May 14th, 2008

Xbench: Psystar v. Mac mini (and all three MacBooks)

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 12:01 am

Categories: Benchmark, Clone, Mac mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Psystar

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Apple Intel Mac Mini, Apple MacBook, RAM, Jason D. O'Grady, Jason D. O'Grady

I’ve completed some initial Benchmarks of the Psystar Open Computer. The results below are from Xbench 1.3 running on the following systems:

• Psystar Open Computer, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 10.5.2
• Mac mini, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 10.5.2

	Open Computer 2.4	Mac mini 2.0
Results	146.87	99.35
CPU Test	133.49	125.63
Thread Test	192.73	187.97
Memory Test	137.86	129.88
Quartz Graphics Test	201.00	180.70
OpenGL Graphics Test	173.80	295.74
User Interface Test	286.67	266.94
Disk Test	74.01	27.16

Higher scores are better.

 

In short, the Psystar pretty much trounces the closest price Mac available from Apple – the Mac mini – in both overall results and the CPU test.As a point of reference, I also benchmarked Apple’s current notebooks, after the jump…

• MacBook Air 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 10.5.2
• MacBook, 2.16GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, 10.5.2
• MacBook Pro 2.4GHz (Penryn) C2D, 4GB RAM, 10.4.11

	MacBook Air 1.6	MacBook 2.16	MacBook Pro 2.4
Results	46.50	103.81	136.85
CPU Test	84.30	134.51	136.18
Thread Test	154.82	203.43	357.67
Memory Test	140.32	134.86	155.48
Quartz Graphics Test	99.65	159.70	155.63
OpenGL Graphics Test	16.90	307.89	137.02
User Interface Test	108.25	225.28	273.72
Disk Test	21.45	29.66	58.13

Yikes! Those MBA numbers are low.Don’t place too much stock in XBench’s Open GL test though, it only serves to test whether a card supports Open GL, not how fast it is. The same is true (but to a lesser extent) for the Quartz and UI tests.Xbench also has a companion Web site that allows graphical side-by-side comparison of any out of thousands of submitted benchmarks.

Next up benchmarks using Primate Labs’ GeekBench.