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"Hackintosh" Fairs Really Well Against Real Macs In Benchmarking
Written By Mike on Nov. 16, 2007.
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In case you didn't see it, Adam Pash from Lifehacker built his own PC for about $800-900 and then installed a patched version of Leopard onto it. He provided some very detailed instructions for walking in his footsteps in case you're interested in building it too. Well today he's posted some benchmarks for his Hackintosh and how it stacks up against a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro, and it's really astounding what speeds he was able to generate. The skinny is that the Hackintosh bested the Mac Pro in most speed tests except for processor-intensive operations which it was triumphant, mainly because it is running two dual-core processors. The MacBook Pro was dusted in nearly all tests.
Some people in the comment section are saying it's not fair because the Hackintosh had 4GB of RAM, but if you can build a computer with 4GB of RAM for about $800-900 and have it beat a $2000 computer, I think that's pretty fair, especially since the extra memory only cost him about $120. What's really interesting to me is that you could spend a few hundred dollars more and get a faster processor, upgraded video card, and more RAM, and do some real damage against the fastest Macs Apple has to offer that would cost 3x as much.
If you're interested in building something like this for yourself, his Newegg purchasing list is available for viewing.
Oli
Written Nov. 16, 2007 / Report /
And he could have got cheaper RAM too. There seem to be plenty of comments suggesting that if you were really worried about the price, you could get 4gigs for around the $99 mark.
I thought it was quite surprising how well it did against the $2500 Mac Pro in general things. Wasn't too surprising that the MP was twice as fast on the hardcore number games (video/audio transcoding).
Needless to say, if he threw another $1000 at the computer (mainly the CPU), it would have wiped the floor with the Macs in all but the startup (because Macs have special streamlined BIOSes).
If he'd gone further and opted in for a couple of RAID0 10,000RPM WD Raptors, it would blow the Macs away.
Isn't it funny? PCs run OSX faster than Macs and Macs run XP faster than PCs. It's a strange world.
Hige
Written Dec. 16, 2007 / Report /
That's pretty cool in principle, but it lacks sexiness.