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My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted
articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things
Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your
submission to Dan Knight
.
It's funny, but I really have no clue why people constantly argue
about the differences between the Mac and PC platforms and their
speeds!
I have a home network currently consisting of five computers:
I have a Power Mac G4/450
w/384 MB RAM, an IBM 300PL PII/400 w/288 MB RAM, a Dell Dimension
Celeron 800 MHz w/192 MB RAM, a Power
Mac 6500 w/G3 accelerator @ 300 MHz w/128 MB RAM, and a Dell
Inspiron 4100 PIII/866 w/192 MB RAM.
All five computers are networked and have access to the Internet
via Verizon DSL; all five five computers share documents, music, and
games. I recently installed SETI@home
and decided to install the program on all five computers. It did not
begin as a benchmark, but I could not help but notice that the PCs
were lagging in number crunching performance.
I initially installed SETI@home on my Dell PIII/866 laptop and
began running the program. I then decided to do it to the rest. I
installed and ran the program on my IBM PC about 25 minutes after
starting it on my laptop. 5 minutes after that I installed it on my
Power Mac G4, 15 minutes after that I installed and ran the program
on my Dell Dimension, then 5 minutes later installed and ran the
program on the Power Mac 6500.
To my surprise when making the rounds and checking on all 5
computers, I found that the 450 MHz Power Mac G4 crunched data more
quickly than the 866 MHz Pentium III laptop - and that was after
starting the PowerMac G4 30 minutes after starting the laptop!
I continued to check on all the computers and found that the
Macintosh computers were crunching data much more quickly than their
PC counterparts. The Power Mac G4 was leading all other computer even
though it was started 30 minutes after the fastest (by MHz) computer
I have! Even the slowest Mac I have, the Power Mac 6500/G3-300 was
creaming the heck out of my 400 MHz IBM PC and was just slightly
behind the 800 MHz Dell Dimension!
I don't know a lot about benchmarking, but this seems like a real
world benchmark. All the computers were running the same program with
no other programs running, all had 128 MB of RAM or more, and yet
even though I started the Macs 30 minutes or more after the PCs, they
were winning the number crunching.
If the PC is so much faster in performance than the Mac, why was
my three year old Power Mac G4/450 able to surpass a three month old
PIII 866 MHz laptop?
After witnessing this, I know for certain that there is a
Megahertz Myth!
Further Reading
SETI@home
platform comparison. Pentium/Windows currently averages
21:06:49.6 per work unit vs. 17:41:29.8 for the Macintosh.
SETI@home
club teams. Team MacAddict #3 among clubs, averaging
15:38:07.7 per work unit. Faster teams tend to be running Linux,
not Windows.
Team
Mac Observer stats. "Low End Dan" has contributed 1,817 units
averaging 14:59:51.2 using various Macs and the classic Mac OS,
"Low End Mac" has contributed 46 units @ 24:20:36.1 per unit under
OS X, and Team 6100
keeps plugging away - 533 units at 108 hours, 52 minutes, 57.4
seconds per unit, every single one done on a 60 or 66 MHz Power
Mac 6100.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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