Rember is actually a GUI for the popular command line memory testing tool called. 2019 Mac Pro + 1.5TB of RAM = the Ultimate Google Chrome Machine? I take it head to head with 6,000 tabs and showcase what that much RAM is actually good for.
How to monitor your Mac’s performance? How to tell that your computer works at its full? How to compare it to other machines with similar specifications? The answer: Mac benchmark tools.
Benchmarking can help you understand the performance of your Mac’s software and hardware, including the disk speed, memory, and graphics card performance. This information is very useful as you can see the weak spots in your system that can be enhanced.
Luckily, there are many apps that can help you measure how various components of your Mac work. And in this article, we’ll look at five tools that can help you test your Mac performance.
You’ll know how they work and what they can measure. Plus, we’ll tell you about a utility that cannot only help you monitor your Mac’s performance but also improve its work and take it to a whole new level. So let’s roll!
1. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
As you have already understood from its name, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test measures your hard drive performance, in particular, its reads/writes speeds. It was designed to help video editors to determine if their hard drives can handle various video files.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is extremely easy to use. It consists of a single window and a big Speed Test Start button. If you have a single hard drive, simply click the Start button and Blackmagic will test your hard drive and show the results.
If you have multiple hard drives, you need to choose which one you want to test. To do that, go the Blackmagic’s settings by opening the File or Stress menus from its toolbar. Once you’ve chosen the hard drive, you may click Start to run a test.
If you are looking for a good hard drive speed test on Mac, feel free to use Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. It is free to download from the App Store, so take advantage of this tool whenever you need.
2. Geekbench
Geekbench is a useful app for measuring the CPU performance and memory speed on your Mac. It includes different tests that were designed to estimate how well your Mac can run everyday tasks.
To start the Macbook performance test, you need to install the app, launch it, choose your processor architecture and click Run Benchmarks.
When the test is completed, you can compare your results with other users. Don’t miss this great opportunity, it is really useful to see whether users on the same computer get the similar results. This may suggest that there is a problem with your Mac and what you should really expect from your particular model and hardware.
You can try Geekbench for free, but if you want to get the full version, you need to buy it from the App store.
3. Cinebench
Cinebench is a platform used to test two things: CPU and graphics card performance. It may be interesting for you to know that Cinebench is based on MAXON’s Cinema 4D animation software that is used for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in different popular movies, including Iron Man 3, Prometheus, and Oblivion.
You can use Cinebench to test:
- Main processor performance. Cinebench uses all your system’s processing power to test how quickly your processor can render a complex 3D scene that contains more than 2,000 objects, a great number of shadows, sharp reflections, and more. And the higher number you get, the faster your processor.
- Graphics card performance. This test uses a 3D car scene that shows the car chase. And to test the capabilities of your graphics hardware, Cinebench uses a great variety of different effects and textures. The higher the numbers, the faster your graphics card is.
Cinebench is free to use, so if you need to run a CPU speed test on Mac or measure your graphics card performance, try it out.
4. Novabench
Novabench is a free tool that provides Mac benchmark test for your whole system, including CPU, RAM and graphics performance.
You can test your whole computer in minutes and even compare results with thousands of other systems. To run the Mac speed test, do the following:
- Launch the app.
- Click the Start Tests button. Novabench will start running different tests.
- Wait 1-2 minutes for the tests to run. Don’t use your computer during the tests.
- Get the results of each test along with the Novabench score (the higher the number you’ve got, the better).
Once you've tested your computer performance, you can add results to your profile or keep them private. If you want to share results with others, click the Submit and Compare button.
Novabench is easy to use and provides a quick way to test Mac performance.
5. CleanMyMac X: For overall computer performance
While the apps mentioned above are designed to measure Mac performance, a utility like CleanMyMac X can also optimize your Mac and improve its efficiency.
CleanMyMac keeps you up-to-date on all the important stuff going on inside your Mac:
- processor load
- memory usage
- available disk space
- battery health
If there’s a problem with your Mac, the app will let you know immediately and help you with the fix.
You get alerts when apps stop responding, disk temperature is high, the memory use is unusually heavy, and battery status is critical. With CleanMyMac X, you always know if your Mac is running well and can fix the problem as soon as it arises.
CleanMyMac also has the Maintenance module that gives you access to all Mac optimizing goodies: running maintenance scripts, repairing disk permissions, verifying startup disk, running Mail speedup, reindexing Spotlight.
All those things may sound a bit complex, but don’t worry: CleanMyMac X is extremely easy to use. Just run a scan of your whole system and the app will tell you what should be removed to boost your Mac performance. The scanning and cleaning process requires just 2 clicks and less than 5 minutes. Impressive, right?
Good news, CleanMyMac X is free to download. So give it a try and boost your Mac’s performance!
That’s it. We hope our article was useful and you’ve chosen a Mac benchmark tool that works best for you. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
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Tip
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Stress testing your Mac is a useful way to work out if it is performing to its best and to determine if there are any faults within the various components. Stress testing your Mac is also a useful way to determine if you Mac has a fault if it is using 100% of a CPU, or if there is bad memory. Today’s post is going to describe three ways to stress test the core components of your Mac, CPU, RAM and disk. By testing each one to the ‘max’ you can determine if there is a problem and if you Mac can handle the heat.
Stress Testing The CPU
Stress testing your CPU is probably the simplest of the three core components of your Mac. To test your CPU to the max, open Terminal located in your Applications > Utilities folder.
We are going to use the ‘yes’ command to test the CPU. This command prints out the letter ‘y’ as fast as possible. The result of this means it uses 100% of a CPU core. To use this command type the following and hit enter.
yes > /dev/null
This executes this yes command. It then pipes this data to /dev/null/ . This means we don’t see any output. If you want to see the output of a million ‘y’ characters on screen remove the ‘> /dev/null’ reference.
You will notice in your activity monitor that one CPU will shoot up to 100%. Putting load onto your system. If you have more than one core, open a new terminal window and type the command again. Repeat for as many cores that you have on your Mac. Not that due to the use of hyper-threading you may need to use more than the number of physical cores on your Mac to fully load the system . To find out how many physical cores your Mac has got to the hardware report section of System Information / About this mac.
Using the ‘yes’ command can load a CPU. Add more commands to use up every resource.
To stop the test use Control + C to kill the command. Alternatively you can close the Terminal window. This will load your system and is a good representation of a fully loaded system.
Stress Testing Your RAM
RAM is a little bit harder to test. Instead of pure speed we need to look to see if there is any problems with the chips. To stress test your RAM we are going to use memtest (direct link to the package here). Install the package and open up Terminal.
With Terminal open type the following to test your RAM.
memtest all 1
This will test every byte of RAM your Mac has access to once. If you want to continue testing your RAM indefinitely use the following command:
memtest all
If you want to test a small portion of your RAM you can use the command:
memtest 100 1
This will test 100mb of RAM once.
The test will loop through your Mac testing it for a variety of problems.
You will notice that memtest will only test a small subset of free memory available to you. You could close every program on your Mac, but this still won’t test every byte of RAM. To test it all you will have to boot into single user mode. Restart your Mac and as it reboots hold Command + S. Once it has finished booting you will see a black screen with white text. Type
memtest all 2
to test every bit of available RAM. Restart to get back to norma.Stress Testing Your Hard Disk Drive
The final core component of your Mac is the hard disk drive. The crucial component that holds all of your data. Over time these degrade and slow down. To stress test your hard disk drive for speed and performance we can use a tool called Blackmagic Disk Speed Test free from the app store. When you load the app select the disk drive you want to test. Then select the size of file you want to write. I recommend the largest of 5GB.
Hit the start button and it will test the read and write performance your your disk drive. It will keep doing this until you tell it to stop. Note, if you get an error saying it cannot write to the disk, select your user folder or something similar. Sometimes selecting the root of a drive causes an unwritable error message.
Write and read as fast as possible to test your disk speed.
You can save the result of the disk speed for later use. My SSD drive has only slowed by a couple of tenths of a megabyte over the last year. Its a good way to see if your Mac can handle the disk speed read/write load.
Bench Marking App
All of these separate tests are useful, as well as free. However, if you want some more concrete numbers and a more repeatable test I recommend you download and buy Geekbench from the App Store.
This app tests your CPU and RAM in a more controlled way. At the end it gives you a score which you can save and compare later. I recommend you close down every app since the final score can be heavily influenced by what apps are running.
Conclusion
There are many ways to stress test your Mac. Most of the methods are free and give you good results. It is always interesting to see how your Mac shapes up over time.
Stress testing can also be a good insight into any possible failures. Especially with testing using memtest, if there is a fault on your RAM chips, it will find it.
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