My friend wishes to bench his aplple mac against my I7 rig and is adament he will win. I need some ideas/programs that can be used on mac and pc for fair testing. I have no idea what tests to do so suggestions would be arpreciated.
Well what are the specs of his Mac? In short if it's less then yours, which most if not all Macs are, he wont win.
Mac hardware is the same as what you find for a PC. In fact Mac will lose even if the hardware is identical, for the simple fact that Apple makes the drivers and not the hardware manufacture which knows more about their own products.
This is his Mac, he recons the mac OS will make his xeon run faster than i7 as it's more efficiant *facepalm*
If he has the new Xeon CPU's in the Mac Pro, then that is interesting to see. For the simple fact that the Mac Pro (the desktop system), is actually cheaper than if you build it yourself or order it from Dell.. it's like half price. Your system will win at memory due to your triple channel memory and higher speed RAM (DDR3). Same for the graphical and audio (if you have a dedicated sound card) side. Xeon should win for CPU intensive task, and server related tasks.
that's old, probably 2008 Mac Pro. it's DDR2, so it must be still on LGA775, the best it'd be are 2x Q9550 equivalent Xeons. a close call, but overclocking your i7 to 3.3Ghz (which you've done) and you'd win in every department. Geekbench looks very interesting. if my hackintosh isn't broken from wrongly updating to 10.5.7, i'd try it and tell you about the score differences.
Really? Cool stuff. I never touched a Xeon CPU, so I don't know how they "feel", I thought it would lose, but not that much.
Xeon is not the issue, age is the issue. As said before, DDR2 => Core 2 Xeon. And that is old tech. If his friend would had a Socket 1366 dual Xeon board with two S1366 Xeons, he could have won. There are no Mac Pro's with Xeon E3 (S1155; E3=Sandy Bridge, E3 V2=Ivy Bridge) or E5's (S2011; E5=Sandy Bridge-E). My Mac Mini (Core i7-3615QM) would have a chance against a non-overclocked i5-3570K, but would have no chance against even the slightest overclock - 10192 points.
Your friend is a bit naiv I'm a Mac User too, I have a Quad 2.66 Ghz '09 Mac Pro (Xeon W3520). The Mac is not about raw power, you were right that the raw power may be even worse than a windows, the Mac is all about using the power efficient. Caching and stuff. A fast system is not just done by a fast CPU, you also need fast disks and good RAM. And that's where OS X is still better than Win: It uses the RAM way more efficient. This difference has been bigger a few years ago, since Win7 the performance gap closed quite a bit, but there is still some difference. I can tell, I have both OS X and Win7 on my Mac Pro, both systems installed on SSDs, and even though Win7 has nothing but a few games and some other software installed, and my Mac drives are full with big apps and tons of data, the Mac runs smoother. For benchmarking, Macs are definately the wrong platform Edit: Lol I just realized the thread is from 2009 Well, then let the Mac vs. Pc battle begin once again
Ah jeez, didn't even noticed that . There should be a confirm box before submitting a post asking "Last post was more than a year ago. DO YOU REALLY want to send your reply?"
