CINEBENCH

Whether you want to brag about owning the biggest, "baddest", and fastest machine out there, or you simply want to determine where your beloved rig stands, there are a lot of awesome benchmarking tools out there.

While some remarkably comprehensive benchmarking tools do a great job of determining the maximum performance that can be squeezed from a rig, they're not perfect.

Take, for example, the situation when you're not particularly interested in your PC's ultimate gaming capabilities, or how it stacks against other similar computers, but with other OSes such as a Mac. This is where Cinebench comes into play.

Marketed as "a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities," Cinebench is a world-renowned and very popular test suite that has always been close to the hearts of system administrators, hardware journalists that want to be diligent when it comes to their reviews, as well as hardware manufacturers.

Cinebench is mainly focused on testing the CPU performance of your computer. Its basis for these real-world tests is the render of a photorealistic 3D scene. The scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all the available processor cores.

It uses the renowned Cinema 4D rendering package (also famous for its role in the creation of various Hollywood SF or super-hero movies) in order to provide you with a better understanding of your system's general app and OS performance.

The test suite can actually measure systems with well over 200 processor threads. The results are displayed in points (pts), and it goes without saying that the higher the number, the faster your computer's CPU is.

Since the test suite runs on both PC and Mac systems, it's one of the few products of this type on the market that allow you to perform accurate cross-platform comparisons. And, to top it all off, it's free. Oh, and it also supports Apple's seemingly groundbreaking M1-powered systems, in case you're interested in seeing how your PC fairs against them.

While not something to write home about by modern standards, the GUI is well-designed in terms of functionality. The better part of the main window (mostly the right side) is dedicated to rendering the photorealistic scene that helps determine your computer's performance.

The left side is the place where you can view the stats of your system (processor, cores x GHz, OS, and other information), as well as a ranking system. You can choose either a Single or a Multi-Core test.

It's also worth noting that you are provided with the option of activating the "Advanced benchmark" setting. This allows you to set arbitrary minimum runtimes to stress test the hardware for extended periods of time.

It should be quite obvious by now that Cinebench does not perform GPU testing (neither does it bother with other minor aspects that could potentially affect your system's performance such as hard drive testing).

Last but not least, please note that the app will not launch on unsupported processors or systems lacking the recommended RAM to load the respective test scene.

Taking everything into account, Cinebench is without a doubt one of the best general-purpose benchmarking tools out there. It may not be the prettiest, and data export might not be top tier, but considering that it's free, and it has enough market exposure for over 10 years, there's really not much more to say other than "Well done Maxon!"