The benchmark purists among you may regard Maxon's Cinebench as more of a fancy display suite rather than a fully fledged benchmarking tool. However, there's more to this program than you first imagine, and the results can be taken quite seriously.
Cinebench is designed by Maxon, which has based it on its award winning animation software Cinema 4D. It tests both the graphics capabilities and the CPU by rendering a selection of photorealistic scenes and animations. The algorithms involved really stress both the GPU and CPU on all their available cores by computing thousands of objects, hundreds of thousands of polygons, reflections, lighting, shadows, shaders and anti-aliasing to finally display a score based on the points accrued during the tests.
Despite that, there are only two tests: an OpenGL test that involves an animated 3D car chase that looks like it was developed for an Amiga, and a CPU rendering test that draws a complex image on the screen. You don't get any indication of the frames per second, the limits on the CPU or GPU during the tests, just as part of the final score, which is then entered into a ranking table along with the results of other GPUs and CPUs.
To a point, then, Maxon Cinebench is more of a real-world test rather than a benchmarking tool of choice for system buildings and performance testing connoisseurs. There's an Advanced Benchmark option, but this only included a singlecore use of the second CPU test; other than that, there's little else to test, detail and benchmark against.
Despite all that, Cinebench can still used as a part of the benchmarking process for CPU, motherboard and GPU combinations, but it's losing popularity in favour of 3DMark11.
There's a fair bit of processing going on in the background when the tests are being executed. You can tell from the strain on the system and the fact that the fans are kicked into life to the point where your PC sounds like a jumbo jet. So while you could argue that the tests appear to do very little, they certainly give the system a good workout.
Beyond the two tests, which take a few minutes to complete, there's very little else to add. Cinebench is thankfully free and will work on both Mac and Windows based systems, which is good, as there would be little to recommend it if Maxon decided to charge for the software. And it's worth noting that it doesn't need installing, so there's little to no chance of anything clogging up your perfectly tweaked setup.
If you want a very quick comparison against a handful of CPUs and GPUs and you're dead set against installing anything, then Maxon's Cinebench will no doubt suffice. Otherwise, it's hardly worth the bother.