And the Best Vista PC is a Mac

Apr 17, 2008 17:09 GMT  ·  By

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has left Windows Vista Home Premium in the dust in a performance benchmark put together by Popular Mechanics both on desktop machines and on laptops. On computers featuring similar hardware configurations Apple's proprietary operating system proved its superiority over Microsoft's latest Windows client, according to the results delivered by cross-platform benchmarking tools Geekbench (from Primate Labs) and CineBench (from Maxon).

Mac OS X Leopard's arenas were an iMac featuring a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 320 GB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card; as well as a a MacBook with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (Penryn); 3GB DDR2 RAM, 160 GB hard drive. At the same time, Vista was run on a Gateway One with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3 GB DDR2 RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card; and on an Asus M51SR laptop with the following configuration 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 250 GB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 graphics card.

As you can see, the differences in terms of hardware were minor and, on top of it, Vista has the clear advantage when it comes down to the quantity of RAM. Despite this Popular Mechanics revealed that Leopard running on Mac computers topped Vista running on the PC and laptop, with superior speed for boot, shutdown and application launches.

"We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple's platform-switching Boot Camp software - and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did. Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs," concluded Glenn Derene from Popular Mechanics.