Xbench

Xbench is a very popular benchmarking solution for Mac computers. In short, benchmarking is analyzing the performance of something.

In this case, Xbench analyzes pretty much every aspect of your Mac and it grades it against baseline results. With the image file from which Xbench installs, you will be able to open the baseline results file, which shows what the average results are.

Xbench starts with a very small window that allows you to check or uncheck the different available tests. Those are: CPU test, Thread test, Memory test, Disk test, Quartz graphics test, OpenGL tests and User Interface tests. You have to select the hard drive which you want to test on from the volume drop-down menu. Once you start the process, the tests will begin and you will see the results in real time. After testing is done, you can save the results to a file for later reference or to share them with other users.

Whenever I read an article on Mac benchmarking, Xbench is always one of the methods used. It seems to be the standard in the Mac community. It helps that the application is absolutely free.