AT Mac Section: Taking Requests

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/14/2004 2:53 PM EST
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  • Docpsycho - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link

    Yes, (reply to a post on here) there are mac side equivs for web page building adobe' go live, macromedia dreamweaver (i use it)
    for page development pagemaker, and it replacements, and quark, best on the planet, my opinion, and shhhh. MS uses it for thier publication dept!
  • Docpsycho - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link

    Create a list of what works on a mac pci card list. A few moons agoI slapped a siig usb card in a old pci based mac an the apple drivers worked just fine.
  • MacDuff - Friday, July 16, 2004 - link

    Anand, as you develop the Mac presence on your site, here are a couple of URLs that might be of interest:

    http://xlr8yourmac.com/
    (great for upgrade info)

    http://www.macspeedzone.com/
    (tests)

    http://www.barefeats.com/
    (this is a great site, and has several tests between Macs and PCs)

    http://www.xvsxp.com/
    (this site compares OS X and Win XP. QUITE thorough!)

  • T Money - Thursday, July 15, 2004 - link

    Don't know if you're still checking this section, but here's a product I just came across that I'd love to see information on how well it performs, and what it does to air flow etc:

    http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Catego...
  • sid - Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - link

    dear anand
    i just wanted to ask when is your apple mac article coming
    cheers
    sid
  • gimper48 - Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - link

    How about an apples to apples pc to mac comparison complete with benchmarks and graphics. Everyone says mac does graphics better however if you placed comparative hardware in a pc and loaded it with the right software I am not sure that is correct. So outfit a pc with the same hardware and comparable software and benchmark it.
  • Mel Gross - Tuesday, July 6, 2004 - link

    Something that no one has mentioned here is compilers.

    With all the controversy about how cpu test are done, as well as actual work done by the machine as a whole (throughput, etc.), I believe that what we need, most of all, as early on as possible, is an article, or several, about how the various compilers affect performance.

    There are several for x86 chips, some of which are used to write most programs, as well as at least one by Intel which was written mostly to show off the performance of it's chips.

    How does that compare with the various compilers available for the Mac. Specifically, these days, for the G5. Is IBM's highly optimised compiler being used on the Mac?

    Questions like those might help to clear up the questions and accusations thrown around about the results of these tests.

    Congrats. about your graduation. I know how you feel about Vinny, because that's how I felt about my wife when I first met her (we are both single children). That was 23 years ago, and still going strong.
  • euphras - Monday, July 5, 2004 - link

    Hi Anand,

    a comparison of the old Apple displays (acrylic casing) vs the new ones (aluminium) and third party displays would be helpful.

    Pat
  • Alex - Monday, July 5, 2004 - link

    Hi Anand,

    as DarylF2 I think that gaming is not a focus for most Mac users. While content production and software development is. So would a Final Cut/Softimage/Photoshop user benefit form a GeForce 6800 vs. a Radeon 9600/9800?

    Most interesting would be (for me at least) in depth discussion of OS X specific "issues" like e.g. Core Image (is the image quality enough for pro use?) Cocoa (how does it stack up against MFC/QT/whatever ?)

    Personally I don't care about how e.g. Premiere performs on a G5 in comparison to a Opteron, but i am interested on how Final Cut Pro performs (speed, feature and workflow(!) wise) compared to Premiere or Omni Graffle vs. Visio or Mail vs. Outlook...

    thanks
  • cbum - Thursday, July 1, 2004 - link

    Anand,
    your take on Firewire 400/800/USB2 performance for some common HDs, aswell as an analysis of competing FW chipsets, Bridgechips & drivers would be very wellcome.
  • Adam K. - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link

    Hey Anand,

    Your blogs have decreased since you finished school! I thought we would hear more from you now...
  • Cliff - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link

    What's going on Anand?..just looking for an orange colored update (-:

    C
  • Dave - Thursday, June 24, 2004 - link

    Anyone from Anandtech planning to be at WWDC next week?

    Dv
  • DarylF2 - Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - link

    I know that enthusiasts are your main viewers, and many of these are gamers, but I think that while gaming is a consideration for many Mac users, it is NOT a focus. Thus, please don't focus mainly on gaming.

    I'd like to see the following Macintosh sub-areas:
    * graphics (Photoshop, Canvas, OmniGraffle, etc.)
    * video (Final Cut, Shake, etc.)
    * press (InDesign, Quark, RagTime, etc.)
    * audio (pro audio apps...)
    * interoperability (networking/Samba, MS Office, X11/fink, tips for users of multiple OSs and "switchers", etc.)
    * development (XCode, CodeWarrior, Carbon/Cocoa, Java, OpenGL, alternate APIs (Qt, WxWindows, Mono, ...), etc.)
    * consumer software (iLife suite, office suites, browsers, app launchers (QuickSilver, DragThing, ...), IM tools, note-taking tools, etc.)
    * gaming (video cards, sound, games)
    * enthusiast topics (overclocking, modding, etc.)
    * miscellaneous (AppleCare, intelligent Mac/PC comparisons, etc.)

    I'd also like to see a "best of" listing of freeware, shareware, and commercial software (separate lists for each), where readers can nominate and vote for products in various categories. This would be great to see for Windows and Linux as well.

    I'd be happy to contribute a bit (I've been a Mac user since 1987, a Windows user since 1997, a Linux dabbler (on and off), an SGI user since 1992, and a professional developer (primarily Windows (MFC, OpenGL, MySQL, ...), but also SGI (X11 and IrisGL/OpenGL) and a little Mac OS) since 1991.
  • Oatmeal - Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - link

    I think an article about your experience in the switch would be nice. Not everyone reads your blog and knows what you did (the switch for a month thing). How is the switch holding up? Are you still using the mac? Can you debunk some of the myths with OS X and mac? It seems like you are the first to openly cross paths between the two sides, and your voice should be heard.

    I would also say the mp3 external devices would be cool to review. The airport express, the eyehome, and a few others. Basically integrating your mac with your overall multimedia experience.

    There is a huge browser war going on, maybe pick up on some of the action there.

    Laptop comparisons? ibook vs powerbook vs t42 vs ? What has better airport range, better burning speeds, better battery, better sound, better keyboard, etc.
  • Thomas - Wednesday, June 23, 2004 - link

    Well, I think the big thing to think about is that macs are geared to different kinds of people, creative professionals, and people who just dont care to get technical. I think a burgeoning sector with the macs is services - I'd REALLY love to see top of the line macs included in your IT-type benchmarks. With things like Apache built-in, you can't ignore it.

    It also goes for lots of cross-platform items. Photoshop is a big one of course, A bigger one for me is After Effects. The difference between a 5 minute and 10 minute photoshop render isn't horrible, but the difference between a 3 hour and 6 hour AFX render is HUGE.

    Gaming obviously isn't a strongpoint, but it would be nice to see some benchies with PCs using the same video card - just to see what the difference really is.

    Also, what I believe the online community would really be interested in is technical analysis. The liquid cooled G5 is coming out, great, but whats IN it? Is the mobo different? CPU or CPU stepping? Why was liquid cooling included? What other differences are there from a PC?

    Basically, even hardcore PC people would be interested, even if its just to be educated enough to bash with competence.
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - link

    Oooh, a review of XSan would be neat too!
  • Adam K. - Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - link

    FYI: Apple does not have a high end Nvidia counterpart at all.

    ;)
  • Ron J - Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - link

    I wouldn't wait to buy a G5 if I didn't have to.

    With Exposé, the more RAM on the gfx card the smoother the effect will be for a larger number of windows. With 5 windows, they will all look the same. With 50 windows, the ones with more RAM would be much smoother, and so on.

    Generally, the performance of the graphics cards for games follows with their PC counterparts (relatively). So a Radeon 9800 is going to give better performance than an Nvidia GeForce4 (or whatever Apple offers for the high end Nvidia).
  • Eug - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    It would be nice to see some G5 Xserve reviews too.
  • Adam K. - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    Hey Anand,

    Sorry to bug you...but my brother is just about to buy a new G5 (dual 1.8 GHz)...I am telling him to wait until he can read your upcoming articles (especially regarding the expose performance under different graphics cards, your recommended ram requirements, etc) Can you give an approximate date that they will be up?

    Thanks,

    Adam
  • Anonymous - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    [quote]I'd be interested to know the why's and wheretofore's of this - what causes driver developement on a Mac to be more difficult?[/quote]
    Perhaps they found out that Apple was going to introduce it in OS X 10.4 anyway ;) But it's a nice feature, most FireWire drives have 2 ports.
  • maxplanar - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    I was very VERY interested in a product called Fireshare by Unibrain which would allow multiple Mac's to share Firewire drives - perfect for a DV-rez studio. Unibrain have delivered the product for the PC, but when I spoke with an engineer about why the Mac version had disappeared from their site, he said development of their own Firewire stack for the Mac (needed for the software) had proved too difficult, whereas it was easy on the PC. As a result they had dropped developement for Mac, while delivering on PC. I'd be interested to know the why's and wheretofore's of this - what causes driver developement on a Mac to be more difficult? Is firmware dev. on the Mac harder, or is the community just not so familiar with it? Are the programmer tools good?

    PS I needed this product. XSan is probably my saviour, but it's pricey for what I need.
  • NeutronMonk - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    A comprehensive comparison of Pro video cards under Final Cut Pro and After Effects would be great- cards like BlackMagic, Pinnacle CineWave, Kona 2 HD, etc.
  • David Smith - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    39 - Well, for starters (and to keep any of the people who get really pissed off about this from jumping on you), MAC is an acronym for Media Access Controller (iirc), and Mac is an abbreviation of Macintosh. Some people get kinda worked up about this, so it's useful to know
  • BZ - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    There is a lot of talk of how much RAM is needed in the new G5s. Is 2GB enough? 4GB? 8GB?

    It would be great to see a series of tests on a G5 going up through the RAM and seeing where the sweet spot is. Not just running some video compression, but things like start up times, normal usage, etc.

    BZ
  • sid - Monday, June 21, 2004 - link

    Dear Anand,
    AT Mac section is something which we all AT lovers definitley want as there is virtually no HW difference between the other two dominant OSes that windows / Linux. This and the fact that MAC hardware sometimes is difrrent/ahead of X86 Platform definitely warrants the AT MAC. but definitely some kind of detailed introductory articles about the entire MAC experience would be welcome as it would help us non MAC users get started on the MAc bandwagon and use one of the alternative available to us enthusiasts.
    sid
    p.s this and most of the demands mentioned above. i know it wold make this tough and time consuming but once it gets started it would be line no other.And i think you guys can do it
  • japtor - Saturday, June 19, 2004 - link

    comparisons between the nvidia/ati hardware, specifically some info on cpu usage in basic use, not just games and stuff that every other site does. like i often hear that macs w/nv hw use more cpu when playing dvds. id just like to see some confirmation and thorough tests on random crap like that.
  • Judge_Fire - Friday, June 18, 2004 - link

    As an introduction, a "What, how and where things are tweaked in comparison to Windows" software primer could be nice.

    Compare things like BIOS, Open Firmware, Registry, Disk Utility, Network Utility and even command line options ("man pmset" comes to mind) to give an insight of what the typical and more obscure tools are. Those, and perhaps vendor spesific driver controls for GPUs, which tend to suck on the mac.


    As for tests, I'd love to see (hear) a test of the CoreAudio beast, which for me has been quite impressive, with sub-1 ms latencies for audio i/o. With or without external hardware, compared to Windows solutions.

    http://developer.apple.com/audio/macosxaudio.html

    J
  • Dan - Friday, June 18, 2004 - link

    I like the idea on tweaking mac's, you caould call it 'hack your mac' with different tips on configuring both the hardware and system settings for optimal preformance.
  • Anonymous - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    #34, I second that. I would also like tips on tweaking a mac. What parts I can change (fans, powersuply etc.) or how to overclock the system.
  • Me - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    I'd like to see a "Whats a Mac made of and where"

    Through my own research (using Digi times et al) I've found Apple computers by and large are manufactured at the same taiwaneese plants as run of the mill PC's and are made out of the same parts (i.e ECS / Asus / Foxconn motherboard, displays purchased from the same suppliers as Gateway and so on...)
  • Louis - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    How about a review of the Airport Extreme, Airport Express, and a comparison with a similarly featured third party base station?

    Express especially, and it's AirTunes and extender features. Maybe a comment for who would want/need the Extreme, the Express, and why they would want the third party/alternative instead?

    How about a review of the mini?
  • DarylF2 - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    I would like to see a comparison (in terms of features, ease of use, performance, stability, quality, etc.) of XCode on Mac OS X, Visual Studio .NET on Windows XP, and perhaps KDevelop (or whatever is best) under Linux.

    Adding in cross-platform IDEs such as Eclipse, and cross-platform toolkits such as Qt and WxWindows would also be very helpful.
  • Anonymous - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    Can you do a comparison of different repair/optimisation apps such as TechTool, DiskWarrior and Norton (curse!)
    How can I best maintain my mac?

    Also, I'd like to see you bring down that 2.5 GHz G5 + 8 GB ram to its knees. Launch all the apps you can find at once, see if you can crash it ;)
  • Anonymous - Thursday, June 17, 2004 - link

    Please add multitasking to the benchmarks, because that's what I think OS X is very good at. A slow G4 will beat a fast P4/Windows system when it comes to multitasking, switching from Photoshop (while doing some major filter stuff or while launching) to another heavy duty application is much faster on the mac.
  • vailr - Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - link

    How about a speed comparison between the fastest AMD-64 system running (via emulation using Pear 0.2) Mac OS-X 10.3 vs. the same OS-X 10.3 on a Mac G5 dual CPU 2.5 GHz?
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Don't forget that licensed versions of GraphicConverter, OmniOutline, and OmniGraffle are bundled with Power Macintosh systems.
  • Krishna - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Gino -- GraphicConverter is an excellent image batch converter that works beautifully under OSX. It's $30 but well worth the dough. It's gotten really positive reviews - be sure to google it to learn more about this app.

    For FrontPage - try either DreamWeaver or GoLive on the Mac side. And OmniGraffle Pro (by OmniGroup) can import and work with Visio files.

    MacMAME works for all your MAME roms, and MacUAE also exists for Amiga emulation. hope that helps.

    -Krishna
  • Gino - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    SOFTWARE EQUIVALENTS--because I want to be a switcher!

    What software can I use on a Mac that I currently use now on my PC?

    For example, I often use IrfanView on my PC for batch image conversion. Is there anything comparable on the Mac? Or how about MSPaint, which I use for super quick image editing?

    FrontPage and Publisher are two programs I occasionally use on the PC. Does Mac have any equivalents?

    I often hear people talk about the lack of Microsoft Visio. How about things like MAME, or MacUAE for Amiga emulation?

    My 2 cents. Thanks.
  • wahsapa - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    SOFTWARE!! SOFTWARE!! PROGRAMMING!! ANYTHING THAT DEALS WITH MAC OS X PROGRAMMING... macs dont get hardware updates every month like pc's so your going to have a hard time coming up with hardware to review but software should be taken into serious consideration like a "whats new for mac os x" section where you would put up must have apps for os x


    sorry about the caps i just wanted attention on the subject
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    http://images.apple.com/pro/design/calculator/pdf/...

    Well, considering that all that PDF says really is that G5 > G4 > G3, it's not terribly surprising, esp. because of the MHz advantages too.

    It's a dual 2.5 GHz G5 vs. a single 733 MHz G4 vs. a single G3 450.

    That's like saying a dual Xeon 2.53 is faster than a PIII 733 which is faster than a PII 450.
  • Charles - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Run the exact benchmark set as seen in this report: http://images.apple.com/pro/design/calculator/pdf/... and verify the credibility of the results.

    Is Apple's claim that G5 is faster than those other processors true?
  • Patrick - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    I'm just excited to see any Mac stuff on Anandtech! Thanks for adding the Mac Section.

    And my 2¢, I'd like to see comparisons of video cards.
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    I would like to see some really nice benchmarking of the new G5 head to head against the opterons. I'd also like to see how the g5 stacks up against amd 64's in gaming
  • GL - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Jason,

    A lot of people who buy XServes don't actually put them in server rooms. They may be put them in smaller cabinets in a work office or studio because they're SOHO users with more demanding needs (i.e. mom & pop Mac software developers, music production technicians, video editors, professors who only want such equipment in their university offices, etc). Check out this link for one such miniature enclosure for XServes (http://www.xtrememac.com/forxserve/xracknre_main.s... In this case, sound does count, which is why Apple's been claiming the XServe G5s are markedly quieter than their predecessors.
  • Mathias Nordvall - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    1. AT has had some interviews where you went over to VIA, ATI, Intel, AMD and such and took a look at their respective places. Would be nice to see something similiar but with Apple. Maybe get some high ranking engineer to speak up about the G5 laptops.

    2. I wouldn't mind seeing some evaluation of the iBook and Powerbook series. I suspect a lot of people going to university and/or college this fall would love to see one, know I would.

    And with that said would mind either to have them compared to PC laptops since I've been PC my entire life. Compare the quality of the keyboard, screen quality and such beyond the usual tests of hardware.

  • Steve - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    By DOD I meant Dead On Delivery - perhaps I should have used DOA - Dead On Arrival
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Yeah, noise can't be ignored completely even for a server. It would be interesting to see if the claims that the G5 Xserve is significantly quieter than the G4 Xserve are true, but it may be hard to find a new G4 Xserve for review these days I'm thinking.

    P.S. The ideas to test basic usability are seconded here. eg. The ability to move the OS from one machine to another, target mode, auto-selection of network interfaces, booting off external drives, etc.
  • miranjan - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    We use 1U servers in systems that we build for customers in lab environments. For us, noise is an issue. Just because something has the word "server" in it, doesn't mean that it cannot be used for other purposes.
  • Steve - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Hi Anand et al,

    Some years back the warrantees on HDDs were cut from 5 to 1 year for 2MB cache drives and 3 for 8MB cache drives.

    That clearly indicated that OEMs knew HDDs were no longer as reliable as they had been.

    It is easy to find latest/greatest HDD reviews all over the net that dwell on the easy to test things like access time & write speed. Most of us, however, would gladly swap some of that performance for drives that don't let us down!

    When are we going to see reliability assessed?

    Some drives are undoubtedly bought with performance requirements in mind but I BET the majority are bought to ensure our digital photos/family videos don't disappear into the digital ether.

    So please try to assess reliability or at least suggest a database people can contribute to regarding HDD models/purchase and failure dates/ DOD rates/ heat at idle 20C ambient.

    Thanks for your time, Steve.
  • Jason Clark - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Why would it matter how loud an XServe is? Since it will most always be in a server room, or in a NOC facility? I can see noise tests for desktops or notebooks, but a server?

    L8r
  • Eug - Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - link

    Quote: "Just remember to make sure the Mac is made to look great otherwise hordes of raving MacZealots will be after you, and Eug Wanker won't link to this site 100 times a day anymore :D"

    Heheh. I'm famous! ;) Can't say I link here very often though, although now I have a good reason to... :) P.S. This is being posted from my XP box. ;)

    Anyways, it would be interesting to see a good analysis (technology preview?) of the the G5 2.5's liquid cooling system.

    Also, it would be good to go a bit into the differences of the GUI design and implementation in OS X. (eg. 3D acceleration in Quartz Extreme, Exposé, etc.)

    There are a lot of cross platform apps for benchmarketing, but that's gonna be a difficult analysis.

    Premiere? Nobody uses it on the Mac side. (Final Cut Express and Pro.)
    After Effects?
    Cinebench?
    Lightwave?
    Maya?
    BLAST? Apple has their own version - A/G BLAST, which is much faster than NCBI BLAST, but A/G BLAST is Altivec'd.
    Photoshop? Certain filters favour x86, while others favour Macs.
    Video encoding?
    Video decoding? (I think WMV9 is faster on x86, of course, but H.264 is faster on G5s.)

    And, there are a bazillion *nix apps that could be used on the Mac side, vs. *nix on x86.

    Of course, what would be nice would be a summary of your preferences and dislikes about your Power Mac for everyday use.

    Cheers,

    Eug
  • David Smith - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    One place to look for performance tools is Apple's CHUD tools (search around on developer.apple.com if you haven't seen them). The benchmarks included are quite simplistic, but the performance analysis tools are very nice.

    Another thing to check out would be how well SMP and Altivec are used in common apps or the OS. SMP is easy (CHUD allows you to turn one proc off), not sure how one would go about changing the availability of Altivec. sysctl lists it, but I don't think it's changeable there.
  • ViRGE - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    While G4s are on their way out, I'd like to see some sort of comparison on the processor, similar to how you do traditional CPU benchmarks. How are the G4's affected by cache size? FSB speed? It's somewhat of an ambiguous task, since acquring G4's with similar clock speeds(but different features) is hard, but the results would be worth it, however you figure it out. And if you can't do that, at the very least, even a simple comparison between an iBook/PowerBook at similar clock speeds would be useful.

    PS Dave, this isn't the place to be making personal attacks
  • miranjan - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    The thing most interesting to me is MPEG2 and MPEG4 encoding tests. Use whatever tools are best for that platform, then compare speed and quality.
  • Anonymous - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    Many people would like the RAPTOR guy to kiss our collective ass. (ahem, not you specifically, John)

    I'd like to see how to overclock our G5's, for those of us like me with mil spec soldering certificates and tools that can desolder and resolder resistors the size of a head of a pin. I would like to turn my 1.8 dual into a 2.0 dual, or conversely I'd like to know it cant be done and here's why.....

    I'd like to see some common game performance tests between platforms, with the same game available on both platforms.

    I'd like to see ease of adding upgrades and software compared between the two platforms with real world examples of the same solution applied to each platform and how well it turned out or each.

    I'd like to see the G5 get equal billing and consideration on Anandtech when events warrant it.



  • John - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    Many DBAs would like to see the performance of the Raptors in a RAID 5 configuration, particularly while doing a large UPDATE or INSERT where pages on disk muct be modified to complete the transaction.
  • Guy - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    I suggest a whole new type of benchmark: taking inspiration from Let1kWindowsBloom, I propose 100TaskTime, a test of how long it takes to perform 100 common tasks eg.

    1. Connect a digital camera
    2. Reconfigure from scratch your printer settings
    3. Mount your external hard drive and transfer 100 Mb of files
    4. Burn the files to CD.
    5. Change screen resolution twice
    ....

    Of course the test would be colored by many variables at first, but over time effort could be made to standardize tasks (open source this - invite readers to submit and vote on tasks?), and I suppose that in fact, with 100 tasks, discrepancies would to some extent average out, even operator skill as users become familiar with performing the tasks. Even just getting through the tasks successfully may be revealing. Extra points could be alloted or deducted for eg. no. of popup windows encountered, no. of restarts required etc.

    The idea is to test for basic usability. Comparisons among users' experiences would be qualitatively valuable ("I crapped out at step 37," "I finished at the faster end of the 90-minute quintile, but I rate my run-time operator skill as only a 7"), and, given work, quantitative discrepancies could be minimized.
  • Dalis - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    Another vote for looking at HD and/or RAID options. What is better price/performance; a 10kRPM SATA drive? A modified case with several extra large 7200rpm SATA drives and PCI-X RAID in 0+1 or 5 config? How much would either option improve performance? There are many variables and it is something an individual would have a hard time evaluating.
  • GL - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    Here are a few things I've been curious about in addition to things that have already been mentioned:

    1) A performance analysis of FileVault-enabled partitions vs default HFS+ partitions.

    2) Apache/PHP 4.x/MySQL 4.x performance on OS X vs FreeBSD vs Linux 2.6.

    3) A compilation benchmark similar to the Quake 3 Source compilation benchmark for x86 CPU reviews, done on low-end hardware (i.e. iBooks), middle-level systems (i.e. eMacs andiMacs) and high-end systems (i.e. single & dual G5 Power Macs).

    4) An explanation for why window resizing and scrolling are so sluggish on OS X vs any other modern OS. Where do the bottlenecks lie? Does Apple intend to alleviate them? If so, how and when can we expect them to?

    5) Reviews of XServes with actual data on how quiet/loud the units are (and comparisons to other systems or noise-producing things).
  • jasonsRX7 - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    You might also have fun benchmarking some of the upgrade processors that are available on sites like eshop.macsales.com. Mac systems have a very long usable lifespan, much longer than your typical PC, so owners of older systems are always debating if they should upgrade or buy a new system.

    When I first got into macs, I got a used Powermac off ebay, which came with a 400mhz G4. I upgraded it to an 800mhz processor within a few days. While it was much faster all around, things like iMovie were still a bit sluggish. I have a G5 now, so I'm all for getting new systems, but owners of older systems need a bit more persuasion, I think.
  • Robert T - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    I second The raid, especieally serial ATA on G5's. Also I think there are some Hardware cards too, throw then in the review.
  • Dave - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    Just remember to make sure the Mac is made to look great otherwise hordes of raving MacZealots will be after you, and Eug Wanker won't link to this site 100 times a day anymore :D
  • John Timmer - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link

    One Request: There's about 4 software RAID packages available for the Mac (Apple's, SoftRAID, LaCie and Atto - maybe others?). A comparison would be nice.

    One Suggestion: www.xlr8yourmac.com seems to post some of the more thorough reviews of Mac hardware modifications, so you can probably pick up some good pointers on how to test there.

    One Offer: A great way to link up a series of typical usage tests would be to AppleScript them. If you need any pointers on using AppleScript with some of the major applications, send me an email. Sending AppleEvents (what AppleScripts do) is a bit slow, but should scale with machine speed, so it's nothing that some statistics couldn't take into account.

    Cheers,

    JT

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