Geekbench is an easy-to-use benchmark that will quickly deliver a verdict on your CPU and memory performance.

Why should you care? If you're overclocking your system, say, then Geekbench will reveal how much extra speed you've squeezed out of your system. If you're thinking of buying a friend's PC or laptop then the program will show you just how fast it is. Or you can use the online Geekbench Result Browser to see how well your system performs against others, which could help you to discover how well optimised it is, as well as telling you what sort of improvement you might see from upgrading to various processors.

If you've tried benchmarks before then you'll know they can be intimidating, giving you a host of options to configure before you get started. Geekbench is different, though, because, well, it has no options, preferences or settings at all. All you have to do is click the "Run Benchmarks" button, and a mere 40 seconds later (on our test PC) the report appears.

This is fairly straightforward, too. So you get a single Geekbench score that represents the performance of your system. You can then zoom in to see single values for CPU integer performance and floating point performance, memory and memory bandwidth speeds. And if you need more, then you're also able to see the individual tests that are used to calculate these figures, so for instance you'll see both the sequential read and write speeds for your RAM.

And finally, a click or two will allow you to save your report locally, or upload the figures to Geekbench where you can compare them with others.