Now that Windows 7 is officially released next week..we find ourselves wondering how its gonna stack up against Snow Leopard. Inherently there are issues in any type of a head-to-head benchmarking….like Apple not allowing official installs of OS X to PC’s. Then theirs is just personally choice..what does the end want. That said..we have found what we believe is the closest we can come to a fair head-to-head test.
CNet’s Dong Ngo took a late-2008 model 15-inch MacBook Pro and used it to compare Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and Windows 7 64-bit RTM (with native drivers from Boot Camp 3.0). The machine was equipped with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT video card – all fairly standard in the average laptop.
Ngo found that Snow Leopard outperformed Windows 7 in nearly all areas except for graphics (likely due to better drivers from Nvidia). Some results are:
- Snow Leopard booted and shut down around six seconds faster than Windows 7.
- Snow Leopard took 149.9 seconds to convert 17 songs from MP3 to the AAC format. Windows needed 12 seconds more for the same job.
- Snow Leopard took 444.3 seconds vs. Windows 7’s 723 seconds to convert a movie file from the MP4 format into the iPod format while having iTunes converting songs in the background the job (versions of QuickTime were different, however).
- In a battery test, Windows 7 lasted 78 minutes, while Snow Leopard managed to stay on for 111 minutes.
- Windows 7’s Cinebench R10 score was 5,777 vs. 5,437 for the OS X.
- Windows 7 in Call of Duty 4 scored 26.3 frames per second while Snow Leopard got only 21.2 fps.
Interesting..but not conclusive ……
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Looks like I’ll probably be getting Windows 7 for my iMac, for games. Seems more comparable to Snow Leopard than Windows XP is.