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I want a performance comparison between Mac and PC

J

jcmkk

Golden Member
I'm thinking about buying a Mac. I really like OSX, but I'm not quite sure about the hardware. The one thing that nobody seems to want to do is do a performance comparison between Macs and PCs. I don't care about the photoshop benchmarks. I want an idea of the performance of Macs at everyday tasks. I'm not looking to do any gaming on the Mac. I was thinking about an iMac or eMac. How does a iMac or eMac compare to higher end PCs. I realize that they are going to be slower than the system I have now (P4 2GHz with GeForce 4 Ti4400), but how much slower. Basically, what speed PC would you compare an iMac or eMac to?
 
what kind of everyday tasks are you talking about? I have lcd iMacs, amd boxes and a couple p4 boxes that i can do some comparison testing against if you give me a specific app.

Things will definitely FEEL slower on a mac if you are used to a PC. It's just an entirely different way of doing things. Like driving on the other side of the road. Once you get used to the mac though you find that you can do things just as quick, of course some things are faster than a pc and then some are slower.
 
Macs are PCs. I think you mean x86 based machines compared to PPC based Macs right?

The Macs will be slower than the x86 machines for most things. Mac OS X isnt optimized well enough yet, and many day to day tasks are considered much slower (web browsing for one). The usefulness of Mac OS X over Windows is what really makes the Macintosh systems attractive to me.
 
Get an iMac and put Linux on it =)

A friend of mine has a 1Ghz G4 and it kicks ass, but that's probably out of your price range.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Get an iMac and put Linux on it =)

A friend of mine has a 1Ghz G4 and it kicks ass, but that's probably out of your price range.
Click to expand...

Linux isnt much faster (if faster at all) for most things, like web browsing. Atleast, its never seemed to be for me.
 
Linux isnt much faster (if faster at all) for most things, like web browsing. Atleast, its never seemed to be for me.
Click to expand...

I found that finder and sherlock absolutely kill the system when dealing with large files. Finder just seems bloated and sherlock keep trying to index as you update things, made a large (~4G) transfer take like 3x as long as it should have.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Linux isnt much faster (if faster at all) for most things, like web browsing. Atleast, its never seemed to be for me.
Click to expand...

I found that finder and sherlock absolutely kill the system when dealing with large files. Finder just seems bloated and sherlock keep trying to index as you update things, made a large (~4G) transfer take like 3x as long as it should have.
Click to expand...

I dont have much problem with finder, although it can be slow at times. Sherlock is definitely slow, thats why I use find at the command line to find files.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Use finder to copy a file from an SMB server, then use smbclient, you'll see what I mean.
Click to expand...

You mean to see it perform poorly I have to setup smb shares on my network? :Q
 
Thanks for your input so far. Earlier today their were no posts and I thought that the thread was already dead. Basically I'm just talking about day to day things. Like browsing the forums, instant messaging, e-mail, and jotting down notes (not with Word, just the included word processor), listen to music. I may do a little with Photoshop if I decide it's worthwhile to buy the Mac version. Your comparisons aren't to help me decide if I want a Mac because I'm planning to buy one this summer no matter what. I just like to be prepared, and know what to expect. So do you think I should buy a Power Mac instead of an iMac? I could get a G4 933MHz and almost stay within my $2000 budget after a mail in rebate. I kind of wanted an iMac because they include a display. I also wanted to play around with an LCD. Do you think I should get a Power Mac instead and just use one of my current CRTs? One last question, is the command line in OSX pretty comparable to linux? Are there any huge changes in commands?
 
The default shell is the c shell. So if you can get over the differences between the c shell and bash you shouldnt have any problems.
 
You mean to see it perform poorly I have to setup smb shares on my network?
Click to expand...

No, but that was one of the most glaring aspects of it because it literally took 3x as long. Although in general I do find it a little disturbing how OS X's GUI runs so slow (not that's it unusable, but it studders and things in places it shouldn't) on a 1Ghz machine.
 
Well.. I've been a die hard, kill mac, PC lover all my life.. untill lately. I do server and desktop support for a company and I was starting to get intrested in Linux. Many guys at work where starting to play with it and I was intrested. I never liked the gui.. it flet crazy and had no flow to it. Things wheren't where they should be, it was hard to find settings and things, the installers where crap, ect. Well then I saw X one day... I blew it off and made jokes as my mac friend was showing me how it worked.. then he opened the terminal.. hmm.. very unmac like! Imagine that a command line. I found myself looking at macs more. I was researching the machines on the net and found you could overclock them. (a hobie of mine)

To make a longer stroy short... I got an old imac 233mhz from a friend and installed X on it.. It was really slow but let me get a feel of X.. I liked it. I replaced my P3-500 laptop with a new ibook 500mhz and overclocked it to 600mhz... I found myself using the ibook more then my 1.3ghz AMD rig. Someone I new was selling a Cube and I got it for an Ok price. Next thing I know my AMD box is in the closit. The Cube was nice but I wanted to add a diffrent video card , another hard drive and use my IDE cd-r... so I started looking for a tower... found a G4-450 and got a GREAT deal on a Sonnet Duet Dual G4-500mhz upgrade card..

So, to end.. I'm now 100% mac at home with my Dual G4-500 and my ibook. My room mate, who also hated macs, is now looking at buying one of the new 700mhz ibooks.

I don't know if there is a moral to my story but I'm happy with my machines and don't see going back...


Bart
 
After just setting up a couple of the dual 1Ghz G4s for some of our marketing folks I can safely say that the speed difference between them and my old G4/500 (uniprocessor) at home is amazing. If you snagged a 933Mhz G4, or hold off your purchase till after Macworld NY in mid-late July then you will probably be happiest. The imac/emacs are convenient but you can run into a lot of snags in upgrading them (ie, you can't in areas like graphics cards). I'd suggest just buying one of the midrange tower models since they will incorporate the newest technologies first and will have the fastest models available.

In terms of general desktop usage you really aren't going to see that much of a difference between a PC and mac. It's all asthetics and user interface. For someone who has always used a MS OS you're conditioned to think certain ways about how an OS should behave. It's the same for a long time Apple OS user going to the Classic Mac OS. With OS X it's a hybrid of Apple thinking and traditional UNIX so if you're familiar with Linux/UNIX you can do a lot of things from the command line (ie finding files, making links, starting/stopping services, etc.).

Apple does lag behind the PC world in terms of overall performance but for what you will be using it for there should be almost no difference whatsoever. 🙂

Gaidin
 
Originally posted by: Bartman

To make a longer stroy short... I got an old imac 233mhz from a friend and installed X on it..
Bart
Click to expand...

how much memory did you have on taht imac to install OS X?
i have the same machine... and i'll be installing OSX soon.

and how slow are we talking here? thanx
 
Originally posted by: Bartman
Well.. I've been a die hard, kill mac, PC lover all my life.. untill lately. I do server and desktop support for a company and I was starting to get intrested in Linux. Many guys at work where starting to play with it and I was intrested. I never liked the gui.. it flet crazy and had no flow to it. Things wheren't where they should be, it was hard to find settings and things, the installers where crap, ect. Well then I saw X one day... I blew it off and made jokes as my mac friend was showing me how it worked.. then he opened the terminal.. hmm.. very unmac like! Imagine that a command line. I found myself looking at macs more. I was researching the machines on the net and found you could overclock them. (a hobie of mine) To make a longer stroy short... I got an old imac 233mhz from a friend and installed X on it.. It was really slow but let me get a feel of X.. I liked it. I replaced my P3-500 laptop with a new ibook 500mhz and overclocked it to 600mhz... I found myself using the ibook more then my 1.3ghz AMD rig. Someone I new was selling a Cube and I got it for an Ok price. Next thing I know my AMD box is in the closit. The Cube was nice but I wanted to add a diffrent video card , another hard drive and use my IDE cd-r... so I started looking for a tower... found a G4-450 and got a GREAT deal on a Sonnet Duet Dual G4-500mhz upgrade card.. So, to end.. I'm now 100% mac at home with my Dual G4-500 and my ibook. My room mate, who also hated macs, is now looking at buying one of the new 700mhz ibooks. I don't know if there is a moral to my story but I'm happy with my machines and don't see going back... Bart
Click to expand...

Wow .. sounds like a fairy tale 🙂
I want an i-book :|

 

Like n0monkey said, x86 is much faster than PPC due to cash constrain on develop, but PPC is a better architecture for the moment.


The Linux felt short vs. Mac when compare Darwin vs. Gnome/KDE. I'm bias against GUI, because I still prefer Win3.0 & X windows over the current flashy stuffs. Mac & Windows XP went over board with the eyes candy, but Gnome & KDE gone so far that make it is almost un-usable with cluter & anoying colors. Modern windows should be call tackyGUIs.

Linux isnt much faster (if faster at all) for most things, like web browsing. Atleast, its never seemed to be for me.
Click to expand...
For most distro Linux is a bout the same as OpenBSD, but there is a big different in speed when uses an optimize Linux Distro.
 
Here's a side-by-side comparison of an average PC and a Mac in 'everyday tasks.'


PC - - - Mac

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youre not going to find a good comparison. apple has been known to be better in number crunching and graphics rendering but the mhz gap is making it less or even making PCs faster. either way, if youre worried about hardware, dont be. apple hardware is plenty fast still.
 
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