Mhackintosh blog

To put it simply, USB2 is totally unadapted for today’s big hard drives and HD video files…

I was dreaming when looking at an HP quad-core laptop: 4×2Ghz Core2 Quad (Q9000), 2×500GB hard-drive, 8GB RAM and an ATI Radeon with 1GB memory! ouch!

But now, I checked the GeekBench performance of Core2 Quad Q9000, and wonder it, it’s almost 10% slower with it’s 4-core than a MacBook Pro 2.8Ghz with 2-cores and Intel Turbo boost, on 32bits test.

Worst, on 64bits, it’s 20% slower than actual MacBook Pro dual-core, and geekbench is totally multithreaded to use every core and viortual core available!!!

So yes, I don’t regret to choose a MacBook Pro instead a low-cost HP or Acer computer: spec are not so impressing, but performance is here!

PS: On non-multithreaded application, as Photoshop CS4, the HP Quad-core may be even 2X SLOWER than a 2-core MacBook Pro! It could not compete on the Pro market!

There’s an alternative to problematic distro installation or EFI-X commercial solution (that you’ll have to upgrade for 10.6!), it’s EXI-X, I wanna try it this week-end, swapping my Mhackintosh HD when he will have finished encoded my Full-HD videos

The EXI-X website and blog is here…

At my work the Web Designer have a Mac Pro (4×2.66Ghz/2GB/320GB original model), and this Mac Pro is all but Pro with so little memory, too much system extensions, and the Apple’s 320GB crappy hard-drive. It’s score is 110 on XBench! Far lower than an actual Mac Mini!

I just upgraded the system to Snow Leopard, drop 2 hard-drives (1TB 7200rpm SATA-3), cvreating a splitted raid (RAID-0) and magically it goes now over 180 on XBench!

Faster startup, everything more smooth and reactive, even with 2GB it’s no more the same crapy thing. It just deserve a better graphic card than the slower-than-integrated 7300GT (a good GeForce 8800 for example), and 4GB or 8GB more, and it will be a real fast computer even if it’s 3 years old

I am preparing and benchmarking in USB2, eSATA and internal SATA a new hard-drive, the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB @ 7200rpm.

It’s probably not the best performer on all bench, and probably the more expensive 2.5″ hard drive, but it’s the fastest where it counts: on multitasking situation or when launching multiple software at once, or performing multiple task such importing in LightRoom 2 while surfing the web, …

Anyway, as the internal 2.5″ Hitachi 500GB 5400rpm is probably the worst 500GB 2.5″ drive ever (usual on Apple computers despite the high tag price), it’s performance-level will be probably better in any circumstance, and in XBench itshow, even if this does not test multitaking abilities.

More later this week-end