“You’ll forgive me if I seem a little confused these days. Despite the fact that I work in a lab full of Macs, I spend more of my time lately staring at Windows XP than at Mac OS X,” James Galbraith writes for Macworld. “It’s not that I’m mulling over a platform switch—rather, this XP overload is part of Macworld Lab’s efforts to see how Microsoft’s operating system performs on Apple hardware now that software exists that enables you to boot into XP on an Intel-based Mac. With the help from our sister publication, PC World, we’ve been running the WorldBench 5 real-word benchmark suite on all of our Intel systems to gauge cross-platform performance.”
Galbraith reports, “Even with Boot Camp, it still takes a couple of hours to set these systems up. But once running, they’ve been very stable… the Macs running Windows gave these PCs a run for their money, with the 2.16GHz MacBook Pro turning in the fastest scores on three of the five individual tests. The build-to-order MacBook configuration also tied the 2.16GHz HP Compaq in the sixth test…”
Full article, with WorldBench 5 results compared to three computers recently tested by PC World, here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Tests confirm Apple Mac just as fast at running Windows as any other x86 system – April 11, 2006
Dude, you got a Dell? What are you, stupid? Only Apple Macs run both Mac OS X and Windows! – April 05, 2006
Apple introduces Boot Camp: public beta software enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP – April 05, 2006
Mossberg tests Apple’s Boot Camp: Windows runs ‘blazingly fast,’ Windows apps run ‘flawlessly’ – April 05, 2006
Gearlog: Apple Macs are very fast Windows PCs – March 22, 2006
Intel-based Apple Mac runs Windows XP ‘fast, extremely well’ – March 16, 2006