Best CPU benchmarks: Five utilities to test your processor's performance

Summary

• Benchmarking is essential for ensuring normal PC performance and determining the capabilities of your CPU.
• PCMark 10 and Cinebench 2024 are popular CPU benchmarking tools that offer comprehensive tests and comparison features.
• CPU-Z not only provides CPU details but also includes a built-in benchmark to test performance and stability.

Benchmarking is one of the best things you can do to ensure your PC is performing normally and to also gauge its capabilities by pushing the limits. It's not particularly difficult to run a benchmark on your PC, as it mostly involves downloading the software and running it on your system. It is, however, important to pick the right benchmarking programs as not all of them are the same, and they test your components in varying ways. Below are some good CPU benchmarks to consider if you want to test the new PC you just built or the CPU you just installed.

1 PCMark 10

Best overall

PCMark 10, which belongs to the same family as 3DMark, is one of the most popular CPU benchmarks around. It essentially runs a collection of tests to mimic CPU usage while you are performing simple day-to-day tasks. These include running office applications, video streaming, web browsing, and even gaming. These tests are all great to see how the CPU handles different tasks, and the software will also tell you the kind of CPU usage and temperatures you can expect to see during those test runs.

The best thing about using PCMark 10 is that you can upload your results online to a database and even compare them with what others have achieved with their systems. The free version of PCMark that comes with a single test for your PC is plenty for most users, but it may be worth considering the $30 if you want to unlock all the tests along with some other features. Notably, there's also a Professional version of the PCMark 10 software that unlocks additional features for those who can stomach its rather steep annual subscription fee of $1,595.

2 Cinebench 2024

Best free tool

Cinbench 2024 is one of the best free tools to benchmark your CPU. This particular utility has also been a popular pick for quite some time, and it has also evolved a lot over the years. The latest version of Cinebench — aptly named Cinebench 2024 — brings a slew of new features and a new interface. It keeps the traditional single-thread and multi-thread tests but also introduces a new GPU benchmark, making it more useful and a one-stop solution for those who perform frequent benchmarks to test the performance of their PC components.

Cinebench 2024 utilizes Redshift, Cinema 4D's default rendering engine, to evaluate your CPU's capabilities. You can run this benchmark a single time for quick results, or let it sit on a loop for 10 or 30 minutes. It supports various hardware configurations and lets you compare your CPU's test results with other processors to understand your unit's capabilities better. We use Cinebench 2024 to test a lot of CPUs here at XDA, and I can't recommend it enough for those looking to get their hands on a free utility for CPU benchmarking.

3 CPU-Z

Also great to know the details of your processor

CPU-Z is a popular utility that's been around for quite some time. It's most commonly known as a tool to expose the details of your processor, but you can also use it to benchmark the CPU. That's right, CPU-Z comes with a built-in CPU benchmark that's fairly simple to run. It essentially sits as a separate tab on the utility, and it lets you run both a simple benchmark and a stress test to see how far you can push the processor.

One of my favorite features of the CPU-Z benchmark is that it lets you select a reference processor for comparison, allowing you to better understand how your CPU performs compared to other options. I personally use the CPU-Z benchmark to perform quickly before and after comparison, in case I swap out the cooler, reseat the CPU, etc. You can even use it to test the stability of the overclock that you've applied to the CPU.

4 Handbrake

Measure the performance of creative workloads

Handbrake is an open-source, anything-to-anything video conversion utility. It's essentially post-production software that's available to download on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and it lets you understand your CPU's transcoding capabilities, which is becoming more relevant and important as users feel the need to convert more files into a format that's suitable for things like streaming. It's one of the best representations of real-world testing, making a great fit for this particular list of the best CPU benchmarks.

The Handbrake encoder comes with various options, and I highly recommend tweaking your encoding CPU benchmark to your needs. Just make sure the footage you are using to test the CPU transcoding remains the same for all your benchmark runs, so you can use one as a reference point and compare the results. As I previously mentioned, Handbrake is open-source software that anyone can download for free to transcode videos or benchmark their CPUs. Corona is also a popular rendering utility with a one-click benchmark option, so you can consider that as an alternative.

5 Prime95

To push the CPU to its limits

Performing a stress test is a great way to check the stability of your CPU and see how it performs under extreme load. It's not something I recommend performing frequently, but it's a good way to gauge how far you can push your CPU before it starts to throttle or starts showing signs of slowing down. If you are looking to perform a stress test to push your CPU to its limits, then consider checking out Prime95. This is the same program we featured in our CPU stress test guide, and it does a great job of putting a tremendous amount of load on the processor installed on your PC.

Prime95, in case you are wondering, essentially requests your computer to calculate prime numbers in rapid succession. It sounds fairly simple, but it puts an incredible load on your CPU and involves other components like RAM, power supply, CPU cooler, and more. It ships with a selection of pre-defined tests, which you can easily run depending on how far you are willing to push your system. I recommend starting with a simple blend test, which is great for checking your CPU's stability. You can even run large FFTs to let it benchmark for hours. It is, however, important to ensure adequate cooling for the CPU. Otherwise, you may hit a wall trying to finish the stress test successfully.

Closing thoughts

Those are some of the popular CPU benchmarks you can consider downloading and using to test the capabilities of your CPU. Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10 remain two of the most popular benchmarking tools, and they're both great for those new to the world of CPU benchmarks. They're fairly simple to use and don't come attached with an associated price tag, either, unless you want to pay. You can also grab a CPU-Z for your PC, as it's more than just a CPU benchmark tool. In fact, I highly recommend downloading a utility like CPU-Z that lets you expose the details of the hardware you're using. More advanced users can consider checking out programs like Prime95 or Handbrake to dive deeper and really push the CPU to check its stability.