Psystar Open Computer Notes, Benchmarks and Video

Engadget has had a chance to play around with Psystar's Open Computer and has a few things to say about the controversial machine. "Okay, so we've been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we've formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven't really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we're expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn't really built for this hardware."

Comments

My Psystar sucks

[ForumTroll]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Psystar fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Psystar for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Powerbook G3 running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Psystar, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even TextMate is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Psystars, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Psystar that has run faster than its Mac counterpart, despite the Psystars' similar chip architecture. My Powerbook G3 with 16 megs of ram runs faster than this Psystar machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Psystar is a superior machine.

Psystar addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Psystar over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.