Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MacWorld's iMac Core Duo Benchmarks Debunked?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the numbers-always-lie dept.

madgunde writes "Looks like MacWorld magazine was a little premature in reporting that the new Apple iMac Core Duo doesn't live up to Apple's speed claims. The folks over at MacSpeedZone have done some performance testing of their own that debunks MacWorld's results and shows that the new iMac Core Duo DOES live up to the hype. Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5. " I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

2 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by gsfprez · · Score: 5, Interesting

    i'm completley convinced that for using email, web browser, iPhoto, etc.. that the new iiMacs wipe the floor with comparably priced PPC macs.

    what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is

    1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor
    2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)
    3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.
    4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?

    --
    guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
    1. Re:Nothing settled until Pro Apps... by disappear · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As far as (3), with HandBrake's Intel build available on the web site, I'm able to encode at 30fps+ and still have one processor free to do other tasks. Subjective performance in my foreground tasks is excellent.

      Or to put it another way, I was able to rebuild my darwinports on one CPU and at the same time get better peformance out of Monster Fair (a pinball game) running via Rosetta than I managed at native on my 1ghz 12" PowerBook when I needed to quit every other app on the system on the PowerBook.

      A lot of the help is more memory --- 2gb versus 1.25gb on the PowerBook (each system was maxed out) --- but a second core makes a big difference, too. No doubt about it, I'm impressed by system performance. I hadn't thought that Monster Fair would be useable running via Rosetta, let alone faster, let alone faster while compiling software on the other CPU.