Mhackintosh blog

I just bought an used (3 month old) Kingston SSD Now! 64GB SSD, for $130. It was a great SSD when launched, but for now, it’s under average on write speed, even largely under hard-drive speed, not talking about my RAID-0 2×1TB 7200 rpm system disk, but really actual when talking about read speed, with 220MB/s.

I would like to test a SSD for Mac OS X system, applications, and a bunch of usual files, including Windows and Linux Ubuntu VM, to see how it far compared to hard-drive, especially 2 hard-drives grouped in RAID-0. You have read many many benchmark, I suppose, and me too

I am not equipped to bench it, and anyway it doesn’t interest me. I would like to see if an average (by today metrics) SSD could do a difference in day-to-day use of Mac OS X, and what will be the feeling I have with it, compared to physical hard-drives in RAID-0, on a fast Mhackintosh (4×3.4Ghz, 8GB, GeForce 8800) extensively using firefox, mail, VMware fusion, Parallels, NetBeans (Java-coded tool I use for PHP development), MySQL database and more than that Adobe Lightroom for my pictures as a photographer.

Let’s playyyyyy!!!!! I will come back next week with more than MB/s, a feeling, a human report, maybe some advices!

I have a Mhackintosh with Core2 Quad Q6600, 4-cores running at 3.0Ghz, and ran GeekBench 32bits on it. Final score is deceiving, but Integer score, that matter for my kinda application is explosive : 7098!

It’s over a Core i7 2.8Ghz iMac geekbench 32bits Integer score (under 7000), so it’s a perfect fit for a computer that will run up to 3 Virtual Machines for development and Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL (LAMP) software simulation and test. All these software do mainly if not uniquely Integer computation.

In this case, floating point computation is of no importance whatsoever, and memory speed not so important with 8MB cache on-chip

PS: I will go back to 3.2Ghz and test reliability of the Quad-core Mhackintosh under heavy load, at 3.0Ghz it’s perfect, I just re-encoded 3 Full HD movies in 4.3GB H.264 today!

As I expected, even with Core i5, the new 27″ iMac is faster than quad-core Mac Pro, and even 8-core Mac Pro, as benched by MacWorld. Moreover, the Core i7 version adds a mere 8% to the overall performance!

If you don’t need fast hard-drive in RAID, ability to put more than 16GB RAM (that is plenty of RAM even by today’s standards) or ability to have fastest graphic card (OpenCL oriented, like GeForce 8800, GT120 or GT130), the new 27″ iMac Core i5 is a fantastic performer with the right price tag!

I knew for sure the iMac Core i5 will beat the quad-core Mac Pro, and I am not deceived this time

The actual Mac Pro may sport a Radeon 4870 graphic card. A high-end graphic card that Apple sell for few hundreds bucks, but that is totally bad at OpenCL, a great additionin Snow Leopard 10.6…

There’s OpenCL Benchmark of Radeon 4870, which show it slower than nVidia 9400M IGP (on Mac Mini, Mac Book Air, …).

Why radeon 4xxx are so slow? They lack “shared memory” that is the equivalent on a graphic card GPU of a processor cache, so every access to memory is 20X to 30X slower than access to cache (or “shared memory” in this case) and it could not compete even if it’s a 400$ graphic card!

If Radeon 4870 could not compete with GeForce 9400M, how a Radeon 4670 will? Having 4X slower memory and 3X less computing power, the Radeon 4670 will be crushed by GeForce 9400M, not talking about GeForce GT120 or even GT130 of last generation iMac!

Even high-end iMac with Radeon 4850 (0.8X slower than 4870 GPU with 2X slower memory) won’t be able to compete with entry-level iMac! It’s sad!

Finally, MacWorld changed it’s benchmark suite, to focalise on CPU more than other parts of what makes a great computer: balance between CPU, GPU, Memory and Hard-drive!

Anyway, what is really interesting is that old 3.06Ghz iMac is faster than new 3.06Ghz iMac on MacWorld’s new SpeedMark 6 suite. So the refurbished iMac 24″ 3.06Ghz is a real bargain

And for performance/price balance, the new entry-level 21.5″ Cor2 Duo 2×3.06Ghz equipped with GeForce 9400M seems to be unbeatable, and probably the most interesting model of the new line, except the 27″ Core i5 for power hungry

On OpenCL benchmarks that will rely on real-world OpenCL or CUDA ported applications, I wonder that old-generation equipped with GT130 or GeForce 8800 will easily beat Radeon 4670 or even 4850 cards, even if they are slower on pure games!

Alas, no USB 3.0, no eSATA, no SSD, no Firewire 3200 …

Wanna copy files from 1 external hard-drive to another? 45MB/s speed limit, my MacBook Pro with it’s eSATA ExpressCard is between 80MB/s and 90MB/s, 2X faster!

Please Apple, put an ExpressCard/34 slot into your next-generation iMac for us to be able to upgrade to eSATA, USB 3.0, 2 Firewire 800 ports, FireWire 3200, …