The Mac Feed

As we all should know, Microsoft and Apple have been leading competitors in the race for the best OS. It’s become quite clear that these latest two OSes aren’t as focused on more features, or looks, but rather on it’s overall performance. One crowd says one thing, while one says another. Using a very unbiased viewpoint from the guys over at cnet, we were able to see what runs quicker, or faster. Let’s get started.

These tests were run on a 2008 MacBook Pro (no removable battery pack and less juice than the recently released 2009 ones) , with 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT video card. The Windows OS, 64-bit, is installed on a separate HD, 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue and the Snow Leopard OS is on a stock 320GB HD. 64 bit was chosen simply for comparison reasons. Apple says Snow Leopard is a 64-bit OS and to compare a 32bit OS to a 64bit OS is out of the question.  Each of the HDs have the same specs and do not one thing over the other. For sake the the comparison, they are freshly installed OSes with the same applications being tested. iTunes 9, QuickTime, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, and Cinebench R10. Now that we’ve finished the basics, let’s discuss the overall performance of the two. Here’s the tests, which were run multiple times by cnet.

In these performance tests, you can see that Snow Leopard out showed Windows numerous times in multimedia, shutdown times, boot times, and encoding. Where times really showed how much Apple has put into making this OS one of the quickest to date is in Multimedia multitasking. Snow Leopard took only 444 seconds to convert a movie from MP4 to iPod format while it took Windows 723 seconds. To be fair, Windows had to use Quicktime 7, while Snow Leopard ran with Quicktime X, which Apple claims to have performance upgrade within itself. It is also a bit unfair that this is a Apple piece of software running on Apple’s own hardware. Just a recap of the tests Windows – Quicktime 7, Snow Leopard – Quicktime X.

In Cineback r10, which is a fabulous app, runs at decent speeds on a Mac computer, but runs at even greater speeds on Windows. No contest in showing which ran faster, and better. The clear winner here is Windows with it’s 3D rendering. If you’re looking to run this on a Mac, don’t fret. It still runs smooth and nice, but has better performance over on the Windows side of the fence.

In this test, it shows Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, by Activision, running at 26fps (frames per second) on Windows 7. Windows is known for having the upperhand in gaming and being able to play games at fine speeds for those who choose the keyboard and mouse over the controller of a PS3 or 360. It’s not so much of a competition here as it is a game running the way it should on both systems. The CoD4 was released for Macs later than it was on Windows, so do not think this is the Steam copy running in a Virtual Machine or anything of the like.

The longest and hardest test to do was the battery test, which lists how long each OS ran in minutes. Snow Leopard ran at a staggering 111minutes, which is exactly 1 hour and 52 minutes. Windows ran in at 77 minutes, which is 1 hour and 17 minutes. Reminding you all that this test was run on a Macbook Pro, and as all Macs were made to run OSX and not Windows. Need to say, Windows was in mind, but Apple did not make Macbooks thinking that Windows would have to run at incredibly fast speeds, for an incredibly long time and to play at incredibly great frames per second.

These tests show that both Windows and OSX have their ups and downs and don’t necessarily compete to have one hand over another. Both Microsoft and Apple do great jobs at having their OSes run nicer for all users. As much as I’d love to say one OS has better specs than another – I can’t. Each OS has their own way of connecting to users to ensure that each and everyone is satisfied.  As we awaiting for Windows 7 to land, you can look here to see if you want to buy it or live with OSX solely for a little longer. As they say “the choice is yours”.