A few week back , my colleague James Galbraith post the results of some Macworld Lab trial showing how an Intel - based Mac running Windows XP compared to other PCs . The unforesightful resolution : fairly favorably . A MacBook Pro with a 2.16GHz Core Duo processor turned in the fastest score on three tests and tied for the best result in the fourth . Only a 2.16GHz HP Compaq nx9420 fare better onPC human race ’s WorldBench 5 benchmarking tool . ( Our Lab follow up that round of mental testing with an update show how a 1.66GHz Mac mini Core Duo fared . )
Readers were generally appreciative of the Intel - based Macs ’ performance — if slightly confused . You see , whileMacworldreaders are more or less intimate with Speedmark — and if you ’re not , here ’s your hazard to say up on what go away into our standard exam tool for benchmarking raw and upgrade hardware — PC World ’s WorldBench is a bit more mysterious a beast to us Mac folk . To be reasonable , it ’s not as if Mac users had much incentive to persist up to day of the month on the latest Wintel benchmarking peter — at least not until Boot Camp made it potential to run Windows XP on a Mac .
So we involve our friends atPC Worldfor a crash course onWorldBench 5 — how it sour , what it shows , and , most important for our purpose , what these specific results show about Intel - base Macs . you could get thein - depth explanation on this page , but here ’s the relevant part :
To make the comparisons easy to interpret , we set the service line system ’s final account at 100 . A organisation that receives a score of 50 is half as fast as the baseline ; a system that earns a marker of 200 is twice as fast ; and so on .
With that explanation in mind , let ’s examine the Macworld Lab results once more .
Updated Windows XP Testing
good results inbold . All individual mental testing upshot in minute .
All systems had 1 GB RAM . Macs used Apple ’s Boot Camp beta to set up Windows . All political machine were tested with Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 except the HP Pavilion which had Windows Media Center Edition installed . For more data on WorldBench 5 , gohere.—Macworld research lab testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
The MacBook Pro tally a WorldBench 5 sexual conquest of 98 — just alittlebit tedious than the test ’s reference system . But study the glasses of that reference system , peculiarly the 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 processor . PC Worldpicked that fashion model as the service line “ because its constellation specifically places it near the upper end of the current performance scale . ” The bottom billet : Apple ’s laptop computer turned in a pretty impressive performance .
It ’s even more impressive when you compare the MacBook Pro ’s WorldBench score to other top - betray laptops . Here ’s a sum-up of personal computer World’sTop Five Power Laptops , comparing their processors , clock speeds , and WorldBench results .
Power Laptop WorldBench 5 Scores
The MacBook Pro ’s WorldBench account of 98 berth it squarely among these top - rated portables — higher than the score for the HP Pavilion dv800z and Toshiba Qosimo G35 - AV600 , a little less than the scores for the other model .
