Running Mac OS X on standard PCs
Published: 14 May 2008
Performance
As far as performance is concerned, there's no difference between Mac OS on a standard PC and an official Apple Mac — so long as the CPU and graphics card are properly supported. The Intel platform manages this better than AMD, as the latter cannot operate in 64-bit mode and lacks the appropriate CPU extensions for optimising virtualisation performance. By contrast, the overclocked 3.6GHz Penryn quad-core (Intel Core 2 Extreme X9650) works in the Gigabyte motherboard with a frontside bus speed of 1600MHz and is fully supported by Mac OS: all CPU extensions can be used.
As our tests show, Mac OS Leopard running on a single 3.6GHz quad-core Intel processor compares very well to its performance on a Mac Pro's pair of 2.8GHz quad-core chips. It even outperforms Apple's high-end workstation in some areas — particularly the memory benchmarks. This is partly the result of the Intel system's 1,333MHz DDR3 non-ECC memory (Aeneon DDR3 1333) and higher 3.6GHz clock speed, compared to the Mac Pro with its fully buffered DIMMs and 800MHz DDR2 memory. More serious, however, is the fact that with two memory modules installed in the Mac Pro, only two of the four available memory channels are used, cutting the theoretical maximum bandwidth by half. As a result, even the AMD system matches Apple's high-end workstation in the memory benchmarks. With pure arithmetic operations, however, the dual quad-core Mac Pro is superior to the Intel system, despite its lower clock speed.
Mac Pro: 2 x 2.8GHz quad-core. Intel PC:1 x 3.6GHz Penryn quad-core. Longer bars are better.
Mac Pro: 2 x 2.8GHz quad-core.
AMD PC: 1 x 3.0GHz Athlon 64 dual-core. Intel PC:1 x 3.6GHz Penryn quad-core. Longer bars are better.
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