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a challenge to all pc users who prowl these boards.

1.8 GHz Pentium 4 vs. 1GHz G4

Not sure how good these tests are, but, here's what i did.

I ran the JavaScript benchmarking test on both my PowerBook and my Parents PC with specifications as follows.

Both tests were run on the same 1.5 MBPS DSL connection, the Mac first, followed by the PC (not simulatenously).

Desktop PC:
-Pentium 4 @ 1.8 GHz
-512 MB of ddr 2100 ram
-Windows XP Pro
-FireFox 1.4
-Disabled virus scanner, spyware scanner

my PowerBook:
-G4 @ 1.0GHz
-1 GB of pc133 ram (damn bus speed!)
-MacOS X Tiger
-FireFox 1.4

Well, first i ran the test with Safari 2.0, and my PowerBook annihilated the PC (got around 11.5 seconds with Safari).

However, making it fair, i then did the test with both computers running the latest versions of FireFox.

The PC won, but by a hair. Check the screenshot for the results:
(Btw, i didn't realize Safari's JavaScript was this superior to FireFox's)
 

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Hector said:
my pc is built from scavenged parts, it takes about 15 mins max to scew in all this bits if you know what your doing, i just put it all together powered it up and poped in a windows XP disk and thta was done in about an hour.

i'm an apple cert technician it takes me about 20 mins to take my ibook down to pieces.
Click to expand...

Which only goes towards the argument that one can't fairly compare a home brew PC to an out-of-the-box Mac, or any other OEM PC for that matter.

Still, I can't see how you'd make it in 15 minutes, even if all the parts and tools were arrayed out in front of you in good order and nothing at all went wrong. I had several small things go sideways with my home brew project all of which cost me more than 15 minutes each -- cables that were just a bit too short, a drive that didn't quite want to fit in the bay, and so on. I'd estimate I spent two hours on those issues alone.
 
MBHockey said:
Not sure how good these tests are, but, here's what i did.

I ran the JavaScript benchmarking test on both my PowerBook and my Parents PC with specifications as follows.

Both tests were run on the same 1.5 MBPS DSL connection, the Mac first, followed by the PC (not simulatenously).

Desktop PC:
-Pentium 4 @ 1.8 GHz
-512 MB of ddr 2100 ram
-Windows XP Pro
-FireFox 1.4
-Disabled virus scanner, spyware scanner

my PowerBook:
-G4 @ 1.0GHz
-1 GB of pc133 ram (damn bus speed!)
-MacOS X Tiger
-FireFox 1.4

Well, first i ran the test with Safari 2.0, and my PowerBook annihilated the PC (got around 11.5 seconds with Safari).

However, making it fair, i then did the test with both computers running the latest versions of FireFox.

The PC won, but by a hair. Check the screenshot for the results:
(Btw, i didn't realize Safari's JavaScript was this superior to FireFox's)
Click to expand...



I did this same Test with Firefox in 6.93 sec
 
Some random stuff

MBHockey, don't worry about the bus speed. At only 1GHz, the bus speed isn't much of an issue. It's when you start hitting higher multipliers (around 10x and above) does bus speed really become a problem.

About Doom 3 Benchmarks:

DontHurtMe strikes a point about Doom 3 benchmarks--although it isn't a fair benchmark, Macs have to submit to it anyway. Yes, Quake 3 benchmarks are fair to both platforms, but those benchmarks are yesterdays news. Now it's Doom 3.

Other reasons why Doom 3 isn't as optimized as it should be is because the PC version was being optimized for 2+ years, while the Mac version was optimized for less than 6 months. Also, the PC version had much more manpower behind it than the Mac version. Too frickin' bad. Macs are still behind in Doom 3.

About Synthetic Benchmarks:

Usually, synthetic benchmarks are well optimized on both platforms, so the issue here is the actual compiler that makes the software. Even here the Mac loses. Let's compare compilers. The x86 gcc compiler is faster than the PPC version. Again, the x86 version has more years and manpower behind it. And let's not even mention Intel's own homebrewed compiler, which completely annihilates every other compiler out there. But we all know that synthetic benchmarks coming from Intel also have the most inflated numbers ever seen.

About Photoshop Benchmarks:

Now for a little humor :D . I've read enough MacAddict magazines to detect a pattern. The pattern goes like this.

1. MacAddict (MA) thinks that benchmarks are BS, but decide to do them anyway to appease certain readers.

2. MA selects Photoshop as their benchmarking program, run some tests, and find the Mac to be faster than previous generations, but slower than expected.

3. MA calls Apple to find out if anything is being done wrong. Apple gives MA some "advice" on how to do the benchmarks.

4. MA follows Apple's "advice", and gets much higher numbers.

5. MA concludes that the Mac in testing is faster, but benchmarks are still BS.

About Cross-Platform Benchmarks in General:

Cross-platform benchmarks are a bunch of BS. There are too many variables to consider, and everyone ends up arguing about it in the end.
 
The 15 minutes might be an exageration (although you never know!), but I can certainly build one in an hour - but i am pretty practised - i've built around 50 seperate PC's for friends, family and work. First time took all night.

But one other aspect of this is that there are plenty of places that will build a PC from your selected components for $30AUS and then chuck on a 1 or 2 year warranty. This is probably the best thing about PC's IMHO - the customisation.

Still, I like to play the odds - Mac laptop for portability and pure functionality, PC for games (especially those that will never get ported and probably CAN'T be ported to consoles) and consoles for all the other games.

Anway - looking forward to seeing some results - this sounds interesting. ;)

Speaking of benchmarks - there was some benchmark that went around some time ago claiming Photoshop ran better under windows (i'm always sceptical about these claims about one platform being better than the other, especially when the benchmark is not from an impartial observer) - does anyone know if that was that an Alienware benchmark?

Oh and just one other thing - DELL and all those other manufactured PC's around the place - wouldn't be surprised if they didn't perform well in benchmarks, as a PC user I would NEVER buy them. They just aren't that good.

[edit] Wow - just reread that, sorry for the jumping all over the place..
 
IJ Reilly said:
Go ahead, pull the other one. ;)

I built a PC recently and it took me more than 15 minutes just to unpack all of the boxes, and organize the instruction manuals and install discs. Granted this was my first effort, but it was an 8 hour job from box cutter to boot up, excluding the time to install XP. If I were to do it again, using the same components, I suppose I could cut that time in half. But much less than that? Come on!
Click to expand...
With practice you can get hardware installed with incredible speed. A few years ago I worked for a hardware vendor and reached the point of being able to swap a PC motherboard in less than 5 minutes - this included removing the drives and cards, etc that were in the way, and swapping the CPU and RAM.

So it is true that you could indeed build a computer in about 15 minutes - provided the hardware was already removed from the packaging.

However when I'm building my OWN machine, I'll tend to invest twice as much time, to ensure I dot my i's and cross my t's.
 
Yeah, A friend of mine who was working for an Apple reseller as a certified Apple tech was able to change the logic board in a titanium powerbook in around 10 minutes - I didn't believe him for a long time until I saw him do it. I swear he was unscrewing two screws at a time. I'm no Apple tech, but I understand that this is pretty impressive.

The catch was though that he ended up being given all the logic board replacements from there on in.
 
Foniks Munkee said:
Yeah, A friend of mine who was working for an Apple reseller as a certified Apple tech was able to change the logic board in a titanium powerbook in around 10 minutes - I didn't believe him for a long time until I saw him do it. I swear he was unscrewing two screws at a time. I'm no Apple tech, but I understand that this is pretty impressive.

The catch was though that he ended up being given all the logic board replacements from there on in.
Click to expand...


tibook logic boards are not too hard, the tibook is a very accessable powerbook, just pop the bottom off and with a few screws you can take the Hd, optical drive logic board and all the rest.

a big thing that saved me time is the fact that i used a slot A cpu which you dont have to muck about with thermal paste ect you just bung it in the slot (dident stop me 2 days after i put it together i took it apart and expoxyed a giant HSF and some ramsinks on the cache with three 60mm fans and a peltier) usually i take a while with the thermal paste and spend a while wiht my palate knife and some AS5.
 
Check This.. A SINGLE 2.2 GHz Athlon FX-51 beat the pants off of a Dual 2.0 GHz. It's not recent, but the 2.0 GHz G5 is still being sold and that fx-51 has been replaced a couple of times. I'm sure that when the Dual-Core Athlon 64's hit the market this month that they will blow the G5 out of the water.
 
premier was run in classic envioment on the mac which can only use one cpu, also office is not nearly as optimized for the mac as it is on the pc, excel even runs faster in vritual pc than it dose natively also all but one of the pc's had RAID arrays how fair is that exactly? the only fair tests there were quake 3 and photoshop which the g5 did fairly well in.
 
Hector said:
the only fair tests there were quake 3 and photoshop which the g5 did fairly well in.
Click to expand...

Does quake 3 take advantage of multiple processors? I think it does, but the way it's programmed only results in a small performance gain.
 
Capt Underpants said:
Check This.. A SINGLE 2.2 GHz Athlon FX-51 beat the pants off of a Dual 2.0 GHz. It's not recent, but the 2.0 GHz G5 is still being sold and that fx-51 has been replaced a couple of times. I'm sure that when the Dual-Core Athlon 64's hit the market this month that they will blow the G5 out of the water.
Click to expand...


Microsoft word benchmark? uh...
 
Yes, I believe Quake 3 was a multithreaded app - an odd one out since not many games are.

However speed increases would depend on what subsystems of the game are multithreaded and how it is implemented.

And that is why its a little unfair to claim a single cpu is faster than a dual cpu machine based on apps that aren't multithreaded or optimised to use dual CPU's. That second cpu is pretty much sitting idle if the app is single threaded..
 
I read that Quake 3 is divided in an application thread and a drawing thread.

With OpenGL Performer you can have application process, multiple channels per pipe,
cull and draw processes per channel, intersection process, database paging process.

Of course, if it's drawing thread limited and you yould want to split in two channels with the same viewpoint but different viewports, you'll have some overhead.
 
For all the proponents of custom build.

As I recall Windows "Longhorn" (Formerly: Palladium) will make customization much harder.

It's difficult to compare all these machines when there are such discrepencies in optomization and architecture.

Really I think the best evidence of architecture superiority is in new product developments. Game machines are the most demanding consumer hardware out there and what are the top machines using in their next generation? Multi-core PPC 970 variants on very similar busses to the G5 architecture used by Apple.

So what does that say for the future of Mac gaming? Do you think there'll be more porting of games to the Mac when the chip calls are more similar between the Gamestations and the Mac than they are between said gamestations and PC's? I do.

With AMD licensing IBM's PPC tech, M$ & Sony switching to PPC and Intel running out of options for overclocking their silicon where do you think things are headed?

Hands down fastest machines? Maybe not. Most survivable paltform? Very likely.
 
Well...I think it's pointless anyway...

Great...your PC finishes (insert task here) 8-10% faster than my mac...good for you...then you get to spend 20-40% more of your time worrying about virus cleansing, worm prevention, system patching, adware pollution, and spyware removal than I do...who comes out ahead again? It's all about the overall experience.

One thing I would say though (I still maintain that both systems have their place)...I don't build my own PCs to save money. In fact when people ask me to build them a PC I straight up tell them that they can buy a cheaper computer from HP or Dell than I'll build one for...because I won't buy cheap crappy components. I'm not about to buy some underpowered power supply, some second rate memory, some flaky hard drive, some locked down untweakable motherboard, etc...just to save a few bucks...I buy quality, speed, and dependability...I'd say I wouldn't be alone in that regard either. So these statements that Apple computers can't compete with self-builds on price...is total hogwash. They can't compete with crappily built PCs on price...but certainly they are quite competitive with a PC built with quality components.
 
mcsenerd said:
One thing I would say though (I still maintain that both systems have their place)...I don't build my own PCs to save money. In fact when people ask me to build them a PC I straight up tell them that they can buy a cheaper computer from HP or Dell than I'll build one for...because I won't buy cheap crappy components. I'm not about to buy some underpowered power supply, some second rate memory, some flaky hard drive, some locked down untweakable motherboard, etc...just to save a few bucks...I buy quality, speed, and dependability.
Click to expand...

you defiantly dont get that with dell or HP, psu's are not nearly so dodgy as they used to be there are many cheap quality brands about, and with motherboards you cant go wrong unless you buy an asrock board, which suck.

branded memory dose not cost that much more and everything has a lifetime warranty these days so if you do get cheap ram it will only cost you a little time getting an RMA.

though i agree with you apple is damn good but a self build is way superior in my eyes to brand name.
 
Oh...I'm not saying that Dells or HPs are crap...I'm just saying...let's see...

I'm johnny-home-system-builder, and I order max 10-15 CPUs/HDs/Mobos/Etc. per year...versus I'm 4 Trillion Pound Monster Dell and I order more CPUs/HDs/Mobos/Etc. than the US mint has pressed money. I wonder who's gonna get the volume discounts? I'm thinking it's likely the latter. I'm just saying...it's been my experience over the years that building your own (Highend) PC does not save a boatload of money...maybe a little here and there...but it's no huge amount...
 
if your doing it for yourself you dont have to make profit, screw building pc's for other people.
 
Hector said:
it takes me about 15 mins to assemble, and then an hour to install stuff.

the point is it's a minority that builds systems and it really dose not cost that much less when you buy all the software (which i and most people obviously dont).
Click to expand...

You're forgetting shopping time, shipping, workspace costs (yep, they have a cost too), equipment costs (how much is a torx screw-driver, etc.) and the time it took you to learn how to build a computer in 15 minutes. Then what can you install in one hour, all your programs? Or maybe just the OS?
Take all the above costs and add that to the cost of a home-built computer.
 
I can't believe that this childish discussion persists.

If you seriously believe that the amount of time spent building your own pc, parts, installing OS, and software and troubleshooting... in a strictly monetary sense, equates to the $3200 that you have to spend to buy a top end mac... you're lying to yourself.

Home PC builders enjoy it. They don't do it because they're cheap bastards.. and so you can't bill that time. Even if you did it wouldn't equate to $2700 or whatever the difference is. They wouldn't build the machine if they didn't enjoy it!

There is a debate over which machine is superior, but we're all rational, intelligent folks. We disagree on which machine is faster.. and that's the reason for this thread, so don't try to push the conversation some other direction. If we can find a benchmark that both PC and Mac folk can agree is a fair.. toe to toe... a representation of pure computing power, then we can see who wins..

However, I really doubt that will happen. Because the Mac folk will come back with "Oh, well... that benchmark is more optimized for your chip." The AMD folk will say that about the Intel.. and then Intel will say that about everything.

I've dropped $4k on a powerbook... and I've built a amd 64. I've been at both ends... and I know, the AMD halls for what I have invested and it was fun to research, build, and tweak. That said, my mac is a hell of a lot prettier but it crawls in comparison.
 
feakbeak said:
I don't think most people build PCs to save money. Most people build PCs because they are enthusiasts and enjoy the activity. That's why I do it. I like picking out each part, putting it together, tweaking it, etc. If I didn't enjoy the experience there is no way I would spend the time and effort to build a PC myself just to save a few bucks.
Click to expand...


Ok --- I can understand the sense of achievement - I suppose

some people love to bake their own bread ...

but this would then negate the arguments about Macs being too expensive / exclusive wouldn't it??? --- I know that's not the original point of this thread... but I was questioning the 'economics' of self-build

and despite the uniquely ambidextrous wonders of some highly skilled technicians I still say it takes a darn site more time (& effort) than 15 mins - as some others here have concurred

maybe it's a bit like chinese cooking - all flash in the pan - but you still have to select / buy the ingredients, clean the kitchen, wash, chop, dice ... wash up after you ... ho, hum

& sure, some of us may be great chefs --- but most of us couldn't make a living out of it

& maybe if Honda Civics were the only option more people would build their own (can you imagine traffic / safety / environmental impact)--- but there's always BMW / VW / etc ...

ps ... sorry for rambling :eek:
 
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