Jun 03, 2019 Apple previewed macOS Catalina, the latest version of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, packed with new features, apps and more. Apps designed for the Mac often don't receive as much attention as apps for iOS apps. Five Great Apps for Your Mac - February 2018. Tuesday February 27, 2018 1:17 pm PST by Juli Clover.
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:
Great Apps For Your Mac Free
- 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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Does your Mac desktop look like a bombsite? Can’t find what you want, when you want it?
If one of your New Year resolutions is to be more organized, then you should take a look at these apps. They’re contained neatly in a box of wonders called Setapp – the new Marie Kondo of the Mac!
If you want to see all the amazing apps offered in Setapp platform, have a look at the official website below:
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Similar to Kondo’s revolutionary approach to decluttering, Setapp features a whole bunch of apps dedicated to organization, productivity, system cleaning, creativity, coding, and much more.
Because Setapp is a desktop suite, it keeps all your apps in one place to make sure your Mac stays tidy and you stay sane!
In this Setapp review we’ll take a closer look at a few of these lifehacking apps to see what they can do to make your workflow…you know…actually flow.
Table of Contents
How to Monitor Your Mac System Health
Wouldn’t it be great to monitor all the important activity in your Mac system without having to go looking for the information?
iStat Menus is a comprehensive system monitor that is visible in your menu bar, so you can keep a constant eye on your system data.
It provides easy-to-understand stats on CPU load, memory load, disk space, temperature, fan sensors, weather, network activity, and much, much more.
iStat Menus is very easy to install from Setapp, and once you have downloaded and installed it you get to choose which data you want to monitor, as well as different appearances for the information. There’s even a dark menu bar option.
Once installed, the iStat Menus sits very discreetly up in your menu bar, in the right-hand corner. To see the detailed stats, all you have to do is click on the icons, and a drop-down menu appears as show below:
You can keep an eye on the CPU monitor, system monitor, and CPU temperature monitor as you work.
How to Make the Most of Your Mac Menu Bar Icons and Keep Your Desktop Clutter-Free
Do you despair of ever having a tidy desktop? Does it take you ages to find anything in your Mac menu bar icons? Well, there’s an app for that!
Bartender 3 is available for download in Setapp, and once installed is ready to revamp your Mac menu bar.
It will help you to organize your menu bar icons, as well as acting as a mini menu bar. You can choose which icons to leave in the main Mac menu bar, and which to put into the collapsible Bartender one.
Bartender also keeps an eye on your app updates or any status changes so that you always know what’s happening. It automatically displays app icons while they are updating, syncing, or showing error messages.
Good Apps For A Macbook Pro
If you prefer clicking hotkeys to tapping on the keyboard, Bartender allows you to use keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys too.
How to Speed Up Your Copy and Paste
Another app we wanted to include in this Setapp review is the smart Paste app as we’ll discuss below.
Where would we be without copy and paste? The only drawback is the amount of time it takes up!
The Paste app in Setapp can copy and paste multiple items at the same time, and it features a clever clipboard history manager that automatically keeps everything you’ve copied – pictures, screenshots, links, text and much more.
You can sync and back up your clipboard history to iCloud so that you can find anything from any of your devices – Paste really is an efficient clipboard manager! The app also utilizes an intelligent search while you are typing to bring you the copied item super-quick.
How to Make Your Archiving a Breeze
BetterZip is a very quick and efficient way to compress files as well as unzip them, and it supports over 30 different archive formats, so you won’t run into any compatibility problems.
BetterZip is a great archiver, and is a simple way to compress a zip file or unzip one.
You can browse your archives and preview the contents without having to extract everything, which can be a real big time saver!
![Great Great](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126342213/267091318.jpg)
Not only that, your valuable files and folders are protected by AES-256 encryption. BetterZip will automatically encrypt once an archive is created, and you can share encrypted files or keep them safe on your system.
Betterzip will also help you manage your passwords, and generate very secure passwords for the utmost security.
If you work a lot with archiving files, or need solid encryption, then Betterzip will make your job a lot easier.
How to Download Videos the Simple and Quick Way
Do you sometimes find that video downloaders seem to be stuffed with features you don’t even need? Maybe you just want to download from YouTube without a ton of extra buttons and gizmos in your way!
This overcomplicating can make some video downloaders frustrating to work with, but with Downie you simply find your video then drag and drop the link into the app. Or use a Downie browser extension to download YouTube videos for you. Job done!
Downie lets you download from YouTube, as well as letting you save video from other websites like Vimeo, Facebook, and Instagram. You can change the preferences to the type of video quality you want to download, and if you want to download any subtitles etc.
Best Apps For Mac In 2019
Another handy feature is that you can search for videos directly from Downie instead of your browser – another time saver!
Downie is also able to download 4K videos, so you can watch in high-definition. Or you can decide you just to download the audio track from the video instead.
Finally, a streamlined, no-nonsense video downloader!
Final Thoughts in our Setapp Review
![Windows Windows](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126342213/766588209.jpg)
All these apps and many more come with Setapp, which gives you the choice of which apps you want to download and install – so no unnecessary apps cluttering up your system.
Setapp offers you the choice of over 170 Mac apps with membership, and is an affordable choice for those who want to keep their apps in one place.
You can install as many or as few of the available apps as you like for a small monthly subscription.
New apps are also being added all the time, so there’s bound to be an app (or several!) that are destined to become your new favorites.