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New Tests: Latest Macs Prove Faster than Vista Notebooks
June 12th, 2009 by Mike Prospero
While Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ad campaign is clever but slightly smarmy, perhaps the company is going the wrong route by constantly focusing on Vista’s headaches. Instead, perhaps Apple should focus on how much faster Macs are than Windows machines.
When we recently tested out both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro, they smoked PCs when it came to several of our benchmark tests, but only when those Macs were running their native OS, not Vista (via Boot Camp).
One of those tests is our transcoding benchmark, where we convert a 114-MB MP4 file to an AVI using Handbrake. We first transcode the video without anything else running, and then we perform the same task while compressing a 4.97GB folder of multimedia files in the background.
When running Vista on both Macs in Boot Camp mode, both performed pretty well, with their times coming in under the respective category averages.
However, when we performed the same tests in Mac OS X Leopard (using the Mac version of Handbrake and Apple’s own compression utility), the results were markedly better. In fact, the only systems that beat out the Macs were quad-core gaming rigs running programs optimized to make use of all four processors.
In our LAPTOP Transfer Test, which tests hard drive performance, the Macs did much worse when running the test in Vista, and much, much better when running the test in OS X. In the case of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, the transfer rate nearly tripled, to nearly double the mainstream category average.
So what does all this mean? Considering that the hardware in the two MacBook Pros (Intel Core 2 Duo processors and Nvidia 9400M graphics) is the same as in many other PCs, it would be safe to conclude that there’s so much overhead that goes into running Vista that notebooks running this flavor of Windows don’t have nearly as many resources at hand as they do when running OS X.
Not convinced? We plan on doing more direct comparisons with similarly configured Windows notebooks, as well as running the above tests under Windows 7 ($79.95). What other tests would you like to see us run on the new MacBook Pros?
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6 Responses to “New Tests: Latest Macs Prove Faster than Vista Notebooks”
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June 12th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I am surprised by the transcoding test, since this depends on the CPU and in the codec implementation itself, not so much on the OS. However, I’m glad that someone finally proves how SLOW NTFS (the filesystem used by Windows) is.
Any owner of a netbook with a slow SSD has experienced what a HUGE difference it makes to install Windows using FAT instead of NTFS. And to be honest, FAT is an old and very underperforming filesystem itself. HFS (used by OS X) is also not a performance champion, but compared to NTFS it flies (as proved in your tests).
I stopped using Windows 5-6 years ago because of the unbearable NTFS performance (I use Linux since). I’m amazed that Windows can’t fix this horrible problem with their OS in so many years (and also amazed that not many people talk about it, so thanks for that).
Battery life seems much better under OS X too. The 13 inch MacBook consumes 9.4 watts in your usual test. Similar hardware in Windows is in the 12-14 watts range.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:56 am
I would like to see speed tests run on similarly configured PCs-turned-Hackintoshes. If the conclusion is that notebooks running Vista are slower because of a bloated OS, then what would happen if you switched it out for OS X?
June 14th, 2009 at 5:16 am
Did you use the same DOS when testing Vista ? BootCamp usually uses FAT32 instead of NTFS, which slows down the disk access significantly.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Ah, and since you’re willing to test out things, including Linux in a LAPTOP transfer test would be nice (it would tell if NTFS is very slow or HFS very fast).
June 17th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Don’t know about HFS, but if you compare say disk performance under linux using ext3 to NTFS under Windows the differences are quite staggering, so I’m not at all surpised at the file system performance differences you noted.
I’m somewhat suspicious of the encoding tests though. Handbrake originally came out for the MAC, and was later made available for the PC. Is the version for the PC optimized? Would other PC encode applications perform much better? Can’t tell from your limited analysis. Honestly, it seems unlikely that something so CPU bound would have different performance from one OS to the next to any great degree. More likely you’re seeing differences in the implementation of the encoders.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:38 am
I’m running OS X and Windows 7 on my PC atm. And I can tell that OS X is MUCH faster than windows. It’s booting in about 15 sec while windows needs more than 30. And after these 30 secs windows also needs to load all the programms etc. OS X works right after the boot, that’s what I like a lot about osx.