To make a long story short, High Sierra provides a modest performance boost for Gandalf, my mid–2010 Mac mini.

Whew, those were a lot of geeky numbers and phrases. The memory bandwidth with multiple cores was boosted to 3.8GB/second, for a score of 3616. Face detection scored 2682, a 45 point boost. Speech recognition got a score of 2147, processing 18.4 words per second. In multi-core performance, the Mac mini scored 1909, a 238 point difference. Multi-core performance, too, improves in High Sierra compared to Sierraīy way of contrast, the single-core overall score for High Sierra on Gandalf was 1169. Memory bandwidth was 3.41GB/second, getting a score of 639 according to Geekbench 4’s test parameters. Face detection occurred at 770.3 Ksubwindows per second, leading to a score of 2637.

Using both cores, the Mac mini processed speech recognition tasks at 14.5 words per second, for a 1691 score. Under macOS Sierra, the single- and multi-core scores were 10 respectively. Single-core performance of Sierra versus High Sierra shows some improvement with the newer operating system Regardless of whether the test was single-core or multi-core, High Sierra provided consistently better performance in the analysis. If you aren’t quite so interested in exact numbers, feel free to skip ahead to “Interpreting the Benchmarks.” The Benchmark ResultsĪs you’ll see in the charts below, macOS High Sierra performed modestly better in all categories. Now for the scores – if you’re into geekspeak, keep reading the results. Then I downloaded Geekbench again, after the initial time of Spotlight indexing was finished, and ran another series of tests. I didn’t install any additional software, except for Geekbench 4 in Tryout mode.Īfter obtaining the Geekbench 4 results for Sierra, I downloaded and performed a clean install of macOS High Sierra. I performed a clean install of macOS Sierra. Gandalf, my mid–2010 Mac mini, has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor and 8GB of RAM. The mid-2010 Mac mini isn’t the pinnacle of computer performance, but it still fares better with High Sierra than the operating system’s predecessor Testing High Sierra on Older Macs Let’s look at how I compared Sierra with High Sierra. From my testing, I can confirm that High Sierra provides a modest improvement in performance.

While my daily driver is Valtur, the TMO Hackintosh, I also have a mid–2010 Mac mini. Foks have been saying that installing macOS High Sierra on older Macs provides better performance, so I decided to test that theory.

Mac os high sierra review