OS X Performs Better than Win7 on a Hackintosh?

[Bryan]

I ran some benchmarks today on a machine I've had since last February, and I was pretty surprised by the results. Here they are, as measured by NovaBench:

OS X Benchmarks 1,116 Overall:

iMac (iMac11,1)
Intel Core i5 running at 2670 MHz
ATI Radeon 4850 Series GPU

4096 MB System RAM (Score: 117)
- RAM Speed: 4575 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 407)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 133287376
- Integer Operations/Second: 258661248
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 939868

Graphics Tests (Score: 567)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 1062

Hardware Tests (Score: 25)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 232 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 89 MB/s

Win7-64 Benchmarks 904 Overall:

Intel Core i5 750 2.67GHz running at 2664 MHz
ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU

4092 MB System RAM (Score: 137)
- RAM Speed: 8590 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 404)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 103073140
- Integer Operations/Second: 345251300
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 895187

Graphics Tests (Score: 330)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 937

Hardware Tests (Score: 33)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 366 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 101 MB/s

The craziest thing to me is that the graphics card benched better on OS X, despite it being an unsupported card. And it generally seems to perform better in Windows (well, I've only really used it for StarCraft II). But the CPU also seems to have a slightly higher score.

Best thing about the Win7 by comparison seems to be RAM. It appears to be twice as fast, which I reckon is because it's running in dual-channel mode. Does OS X not support dual-channel RAM or do I not have it turned on?

Anyways I could see how the benchmarks could be quite comparable if all my component drivers were supported on both systems, but perhaps this is typical?

 

[ShavenYak]

I compared Geekbench scores under Windows and OS X recently. I didn't save my Windows results, but the main things I noticed were that OS X did remarkably better in floating point operations, and Windows had slightly better memory performance.

OS X should support dual channel just fine, and notice despite the large variance in the MB/s numbers, the "score" is only 137 - 117, whatever that means.

 

[Bryan]

Yeah, clearly mine is better in FLOPs as well, though the integer performance is better on Windows. Don't know which is more important, but the processor speed seems good on both. I don't know how the scoring system works exactly, looking at their website I guess they give more weight to RAM amount than speed, so I guess that explains that difference. I still don't know what to make of the graphics performance though.

Anyways, I guess it's good to know my install is working about as well as can be expected.