FAQ

Here are the most asked questions about iBench. For more info, please use our wiki.

  1. What is a benchmark?
  2. What is the meaning of the results?
  3. What can I do with results?
  4. Which is the base Mac?
  5. Is iBench compatible with my Mac?
  6. Why are files in my Desktop after execution?
  7. Is iBench software libre?

What is a benchmark?

A benchmark is a piece of software that allows to measure the performance of many components, even software or hardware, like CPU, a data base system or a Web server.

What is the meaning of the results?

It is not possible to give an absolute measure of the performance of a computer, instead of it, comparing results are offered based on a concrete Mac.

Those results state how many times is a computer faster than the base computer. A result of 4,10 means that your mac is 4,1 times faster than the base Mac.

What can I do with results?

Basically, compare the performance of two Macs.

Which is the base Mac?

No one. The base Mac is a compound result that allows to get the best representativity of all areas tested.

It is estimated that a dual PowerPC G4 of 1 GHz with DDR2-667 memory reaches a result of aproximately 1,00.

Is iBench compatible with my Mac?

iBench is a Universal Binary and works seamlessly on 32- and 64-bit Macs and on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

The only requirements are 512 MiB of RAM or more and have the Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" operating system.

Why are files in my Desktop after execution?

They are the results of the image tests. One represents the Mandelbrot set, a fractal generated by a floating point test. Others are result of the Gaussian blur, edge detection and JPEG compression tests.

Is iBench software libre (free software)?

Since February 2008 iBench is an open source project.