My PPC Mac is faster than...

[Starfighter]

Originally Posted by throAU

No it's not.

Go rip a DVD and get back to me tomorrow when it finished.

Why rip a DVD (and wait forever) when you can download it in three minutes? I just don't understand this ripping business...

[rjcalifornia]

Originally Posted by Starfighter

Why rip a DVD (and wait forever) when you can download it in three minutes? I just don't understand this ripping business...

Ripping DVD's is so retro, I mean DVDs are cheap...

[mentaluproar]

It's the OS. I have a 700 MHz G4 running tiger that I keep around for funsies and it feels much faster than my 2011 Mac mini running mountain lion. Work smarter, not harder.

Snow Leopard was just the right balance of features and performance. Rosetta worked, all my hardware worked, it was lightweight, etc.

[seveej]

Originally Posted by keremtezcan

Just general usage.

this is somewhat interesting.
I've also made the experience that perceptual responsiveness is not so much based on a geekbench score as we'd like to think.
For instance my ol' MDD (see sig) seems just as snappy in most tasks as my MBP, even though every factor (except the OS) should favour the MBP (CPU, ram, sdd, gpu).

Crazy enough, the basic responsiveness of finder seems to be problematic, as even windows explorer (win XP, virtual) seems more responsive.

But anyway, a geekbench score is not directly related to responsiveness. Geekbench measures how fast your rig will go (which you can exhibit by ripping and converting a DVD), but is not directly related to how fast your rig will turn (switching programs; browsing files etc.).

A part of the problem is snappiness vs. smoothness. Snappy means producing results without wait, smooth means creating a transition between states (with the best intention of clear visualization), which nevertheless creates a hiatus of imperfect resource utilization.

I've seen no data about how much smoothness is built in to Mac OS iterations post-tiger, but I do suspect that Lion (and ML) has a lot of "smoothness" because it just does not feel snappy. A year ago I switched from an i7 iMac (GB: 9717) to a i7 MBP (GB: 9518), to make the new machine faster I installed an SSD. In benchmarks, the new machine was in fact 13% faster than the old (the power of SSD), but perversely it did not feel so. In fact it felt decidedly sluggish. The only possible explanation: Lion (vs. SL).

To continue using the car-analogy: some cars are made for the open road and will take you across the country in no time, while other cars are more suited for traffic in the city.

The crazy aspect of "snappiness" is that a 20% difference in speed has a profound impact on the user experience if the difference materializes when the user is interacting with the machine, and conversely is less acutely annoying when you've asked the machine to do a strenuous task (encoding/rendering etc.) And are already more or less "hands-off".

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Originally Posted by Starfighter

Why rip a DVD (and wait forever) when you can download it in three minutes?

4.6 GB in 180 seconds?
That's close to what my high-paid ISP promises, but of course only if the pipe's thick enough all the way.

I'd like to know if there's a normal consumer anywhere who can get a sustained real data rate of 200 Mbps across a sea or ocean. More typically a 4.6 gigabyte download (to northern Europe) from the USA takes around 3 hours. I' ve been told, they could be a lot faster, but that the ocean cable operators offer (consumer-oriented) service providers only low priority and limited bandwidth.

Remember, even clouds are at specific spots.

[Jethryn Freyman]

My G5 obliterates a current MBA in GPU intensive games; it's the other way round when it's CPU based. I also get a free heater and emergency cheese grater, though, too.

[drorpheus]

Originally Posted by throAU

No it's not.

Go rip a DVD and get back to me tomorrow when it finished.

There was a thread on this a few weeks ago, it takes 1hr 20min to rip a 1hr 45min dvd on my dual 2.3 g5. Your MBP takes how long 5min?

[Intell]

Originally Posted by Jethryn Freyman

My G5 obliterates a current MBA in GPU intensive games; it's the other way round when it's CPU based. I also get a free heater and emergency cheese grater, though, too.

Your card and the Intell HD 4000 are actually very close in terms of performance. With the Intell GPU only being 56 points behind the ATI FireGL X3. Not exactly an obliteration. And depending on exactly which core you have and what ATI X800 ROM it has flashed to it, you may have worse performance than the HD 4000 as some ATI X800's have up to 100 points worse performance. The GeForce 8800M is something that could claim that with a point difference of 202 points.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/vi...=Intel+HD+4000

[throAU]

Originally Posted by drorpheus

There was a thread on this a few weeks ago, it takes 1hr 20min to rip a 1hr 45min dvd on my dual 2.3 g5. Your MBP takes how long 5min?

About 15-20 from memory.