Why not get a Mac Pro, shove two identical HDs in it, install Windows on one with Bootcamp, and Mac OS X on the other and run your tests on that machine? You get the same hardware for each system and a fairer test.

Erm, I'm guessing that question pretty much answers itself.

Mark

Reminds me of a few years back or whenever it was some US based rag announced the Macbook Pro was the 'fastest' Vista Laptop because according to their tests, that was the case. As it happens I pronounced a 1.3 Metro, the 'Worlds fastest car' as after driving a Fiesta 950 for some time and learning to drive in it, the Metro was a goddamn rocket ship.

Boot tests are the daftest thing you can use to measure 'performance'. Take any fresh install of Windows and it boots quickly. Then install Nero or Norton or something and watch that bugger crawl. The nearest equivalent test would be to test a car 0-60, then put depleted uranium in every cavity and then measure 0-60.

One of the reasons Apple computers appear to be quicker running Windows (let alone OSX) is when you test them you would be doing a clean install, devoid of all the crapware they pre-load PC's with and take small amounts of commission on. Once 'Happy photoframe family edition (trial)' and Adobe Bloatoshop Elements (trial) are on there, adding 140,000 events to services, startup and the registry you will see a huge performance drop. That's one bonus of buying a Mac, you don't get that crap.

OK, the benchmarks and the conclusion is up. Go on, have a look. I think you'll be surprised...

Windows is faster, except the Mac biased test.

Your conclusion that X is better than Y in the case of Halo is fail when you say OSX is faster, yet Windows has better average framerate.

The cinebench is similar, which is to be expected within standard deviation.

No, no. I said I think OSX is faster because I don't have to sit around waiting for stuff to load like I do on Windows.

And Windows Halo has a higher framerate probably because it uses official drivers, where OSX uses userbase made ones.

I dunno. :/

Any sitting around can be attributed to using a Pentium D. Even when they were out, they were slow, I had one overclocked to just shy of 4ghz and some kind of garden variety Athlon or Opteron on a decent motherboard would waste it in pure speed.

Sorry you said things are snappier because you loaded FF on Windows slower than Safari on Mac?

Wasnt it meant to be the OS you were comparing, not the programmes?

(and i take it you were using a clean copy of FF, because any addons = + seconds)

Didn't Custom PC settle this a few issues ago. A £1500 Mac versus a £1500 PC. The PC won.
Strangely, the mac did badly in areas where you'd expect it to do well, such as screen quality.

That well known arbiter of impartiality on this matter...

Even without considering the difference between a manufacturer supported OS configuration and one that isn't, I find these tests to be far from definitive. I couldn't give a rat's rear what frame rate my computer gets playing Halo. I might be more interested if one was significantly faster encoding H264 video than the other...

Jon

No, what they did was the equivalent of trying to improve a Jammy Dodger biscuit by going to shop and buying all the ingredients you'd need to bake ginger biscuits. Then getting the ginger biscuits and running a load of comparisons which to Jammy Dodgers which were just as pointless as the ones CPC did.

For me all these comparisons are a waste of space. Testing who's hardware is faster of which OS runs faster blah blah blah. I dont really see how it actually matters. If you want a Mac you get a Mac. If you want a Windows PC you get a Windows PC. Has anyone actually gone to a shop to buy a new iMac but changed their mind after reading a PC was quicker in some gaming benchmark? Maybe you had your heart set on a PC but found out that OSX boots a few seconds quicker than Windows 7 and that swung it for you?

It smacks of playground "mine is better/faster than yours, it even says so here" nonsense.

I have both. I like both. Both are a few years old now and compared to the newer machines they don't perform very well. I'm way past any debate as to which one is best.

Al