How FAST and Reliable is your x86 OSX?

[cipherworld]

Hi guys,

 

I have a 1.6Ghz PM G5 running 10.4.3, and I do ALOT of graphic stuff, RAW processing etc. I have 2GB ram on it but I can still feel HUGE lags when switching between apps(PS, Flash, Indesign, etc), waiting for windows response, even browsing full Flash web sites. I knew there are powerful G5s available but I just don't wanna spend any more $$$$ before Apple upgrade their G5 line to Intel, so I'm thinking maybe getting some PC parts and run x86 OSX on it?

 

So my questions are:

1. Can I run apps from Adobe, Macromedia flawlessly?

2. How's the performance of these apps?

3. How stable is your OSX? Can I use a x86 OSX like a daily/working OS?

 

Any input will be appreciated.

 

 

S.G.D

[jackt283]

Answers to these questions would be really interesting to know.

 

I too am in the design business, and need to upgrade from my current horribly slow eMac G4 1ghz. The two thousand plus for a decent G5 doesn't seem plausible for my cash flow. A thousand bucks for a decent Athlon 64 and OSx86 sounds much more realistic.

 

But how realistic is OSx86? People say how slow it runs non-native apps, and other people say they don't even use windows anymore. I really need to use OS X for work, but then again I really really need speed, power and reliabilty.

 

So I don't wanna rely on windows XP

 

So how fast? How reliable?

[39thRonin]

I have been using OS X x86 for quite some time now - nearly 4 months of daily use. I use Photoshop, MS Office, Macromedia, and a ton of other products on a regular basis. I recently finished upgrading to 10.4.3 BF1111. I am on a path to completely delete MS Win from my system within the next 4 months...

 

Reliability

 

As I stated, I use this system on a daily basis. I rarely have any application crashes and have never had a system crash since using this software (other than when I try out new kernels and such). As my perspective is from the Solaris world more than the Win world, that's not too foreign a concept to me - but it certainly is for a desktop (mine have all used win products). I rarely use the XP partition on my drive anymore. In fact I've pared the Win partition on this box down twice to give over more space to OS X. I like OS X immensely - it has been a totally solid performer for me.

 

Speed

 

Hmmm, well, short of pulling out benchmarks, which would be pretty meaningless in this sort of discussion, I can say that I have found no application that has run less faster than it's windows counterpart. The MS Word I use on my Mac OS X box feels just like the Win version - and just as stable. The photoshop cs2 I have installed on the OS X side is as responsive as the same software on the win side. In general though, you'd have to decide that for yourself. Suffice to say, I'm very happy with OS X.

 

As for non-x86 apps running slowly - I've not felt that at all. All of the applications I've mentioned are PPC apps - not x86 recompilations. I use the PPC Camino browser build every single day - no crashes, full flash & director support, etc. - no complaints here on non-x86 apps at all. (I have a Dell 8400 P4 3Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) So, as you can see, I'm not taking barn-burner hardware here either.

 

Hope this helps...

[mvp30]

I left the macs on system 7-8, move to windows (thre was a reason ), move to linux shrotly after and rediscover the Macs early this year. I found that OSX is as stable as my Linux boxes and have all the utilities. Besides all my home-made programs run whith no problems at all.

 

For this I was using my old harware (G3 blue - PB-Titanium G4-400) and, of course, I was in the process to buy some new Apples when it came all this intel bussiness. So I decided to wait.

 

I am now testing 2 systems: Dell portable inspiron 8600 with 10.4.1 (even with wireless) and a Dimension, P4 dual core-512 Mb with intel chipset 945g. Seems to have everything but the TPM. I can not instal 10.4.1 on this system, so I had 10.4.3-1099 and then "upgraded" to 1111 (actually I did an upgrade, not a istall from scratch).

 

My felleings:

 

1.- OSX is a great OS. In my opinion the best. That was true even before Intel.

 

2.- 1099 was not usable for daily use. I have a couple of posts reporting this before I installed 1111. With this unstable system, though, I got a Xbench result of 92 which seems to be over dual G5.

 

3.- When I did the upgrade to 8f1111, a couple of weeks ago, I found a completely stable system. Almost as stable as my PB-10.3.9. I am running eveything under roseta, even Safari to have access to the flash player. Even so, in my opinion it is very stable. I do not do graphics, though, but I do a lot of internet remote control connections. No problems so far. Today I opened for the first time CS for a test described in the forum http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=5446 and found an score of 59, when a 1.6 G5 is reporting 139. (not done yet on the PB). Yesterday, too, I encode a custom made DVD with ffmpeg and 36 min of video mpeg2 was converted to mp4 in just 25 min. So, I am going faster than real time. All these has been done in a system that right now it is up and running for more that 3 days (actually, I do not remember when was the last time. And for sure, was for some of the test that we all have to dealing with this).

 

4.- The portable I am usgin with no graphics driver is performing almost as well as this one. I do not do a lot of testing on that, thouh, but i do not remember that I have to power off/back on never. On the 1099, tough, I have to do a lot of times.

 

4.- My conclussion is that I will buy an ibook whenever available. True it is going to cost me some extra euros, but I will have an elegant desing and, after 3-4 years of use (my PB is 4 years old) you will not remember that you pay 100 euros more. Sure. True, also is the fact that it will be always compatible. You will have access to the lastest as soon as it is available.

 

5.- My feeling is that we are giving a lot of ideas to apple on how to lock out the coming system. 10.4.1 had just the sse3-tpm "features". Now we have the PAE and maxxuss (some call him God of hacking <- I agree) has done a huge effort to make it running on lower end systems. So apple will screw in again and we will see that coming systems will need..., who knows, dual core proccessors? (this is almost sure).

[dkelley]

I've been using 10.4.1 with the 10.4.2 partial hack patch for three weeks, and it immediately became my main operating system. I also am triple booting with mandrake 10 and xp pro sp2. There are small peculiarities to 10.4.1, namely it doesn't seem to share it's usb printer over the network to my windows machines very well (everything works except actual printing so far), although that problem only affects my windows machine's ability to print to the osx connected printer. Not a big deal, and the other way works great (osx printing to xp-connected printers).

I work in design and programming and have no major problems. photoshop cs2 takes forever to get it's print dialog up, other apps don't have that problem, but everything works great anyway. Indesign cs2 is great although I have trouble printing my cs1-xp designed docs sometimes (some files are fine, others have font problems, probably simply unpackaged fonts or poorly designed fonts).

Illustrator's great... takes a little longer to startup than I'd like to see, but otherwise great.

Office 2004 is very nice... although I'm also running openoffice 2 (the alpha package for osx) and it's very nice too, although the porters of oo2 use x for the windows system rather than cocoa/aqua, so I'm hoping the other porters get their act together and release oo2 rather than just oo1 since that other porting team uses aqua better - if this doesn't make sense, go the the open office for osx downloads page to read all about the two porting teams).

I haven't upgraded to 10.4.3 1099 because I've heard it sucks, and 10.4.3 1111 brings so many installation questions to the table that I don't want to chance breaking my perfect install of 10.4.1 wiht 10.4.2 additions. I see no reason to upgrade my OS at this time, there isn't any native software out there that requires 10.4.3 or higher yet anyway so I'll stick with what works.

 

And it works GREAT!!!

 

I'm on an ASrock dual 915 478 motherboard with a 2.8 ghz prescott ht cpu, 1 gig ram and 3 200 gig drives (one sata (OSX), one pata (windows/linux/lilo booter), one external pata in usb2 box (data). So total is .6 TB of storage.

 

Don

[cipherworld]

Really appreciated for all you guys's information.

Looks I can trust x86 OSX like PPC OSX on my PowerMac G5 as a primary OS. So the only concern left is about performance. Best score in PS test we have so far was from mvp30 which smoked a Dual 2Ghz G5(!!!), but others not even close to their performance in Windows. I'm waiting for more PS test results and information in this theard: http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=5446.

 

BTW: MVP30 do you OSX recognize your dual core P4?

[fungi79]

As good as OSX86 is it isn't production ready if you are doing intensive/paid work on it. Apps running under rosetta are noticable laggy and operate much more slowly then running the same apps using windows. My needs are cadding in Archicad 9, putting together presentation panels in Photoshop and Illustrator and after using OSX86 briefly I had to go back to windows for speed reasons. Buying a new x86 machine purely to run osx86 is not worth it, especially seeing that you are going to invest a significant amount. (u stated around a grand)

 

Buying a G5 for 2 grand might sound expensive, but it's future proof. Apple will likely support the machine until 2010 and major apps like photoshop, illustrator et al should provide ppc versions for a while. Despite what a few people on this forum thinks there will still be 30-40 % (as a cautious estimate) of people using ppc macs up till 2010 so ppc support isn't going to disappear in a puff of smoke.

 

Better still if you don't have that kind of money and seeing that you are OK with pirating OSX86 is to get yourself a copy of Windows 2003 server and run your apps on that. Everything will be stable, and you get the benefits of running the programs natively.

[mvp30]

I am running osx native (no vmware) with just the TPM patch.

 

The More Info Box in About this mac shows this (sorry, it is in Spanish, but you get the data):

 

Nombre del equipo: Apple Development Platform

Modelo de ordenador: ADP2,1

Tipo de CPU: ADP2,1

Unidades de CPU: 2

Velocidad de la CPU: 2.79 GHz

Caché de nivel 2 (por CPU): 1 MB

Características de la CPU: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM SSE3 MON DSCPL CX16 TPR

Memoria: 512 MB

Velocidad del bus: 3.2 GHz

Versión de la ROM de arranque: A03 (Dell Inc.)

 

 

As you can see, it recognize it as a 2 processor system. This is new to 8f1111, because the previous (1099) only recognized one. Though the Xbench with 1099 was 92 while now it is only 72. The main difference is based on OpenGL and other graphic data (I do not remember, but can send you the data if you wish).

 

I agree with fungi that g5 will be around for long. For very long, in my oppinion. Mainly because as far as I know (I am not an expert) the production of universal binaries will be (almost) the click of a box. So, if you can go both platfroms, why not?.

 

We still have to see what Apple do with pricing. Their esperience with iPods suggest that the may be addressing the "whole" market, though you will always be able to get a cheaper one.

 

During my "trip" through the windows-linux worlds I started building my own systems. Not anymore. I buy now from dell all the system of the company because it gives me quality and service. I pay for a windows license and then I end up installing Debian.. I do not have even the option to by a linux with a dell.

 

The question is: will I use Apple equipment if it is 100 euros extra? The answear is yes, I will. And if it is 600? Then, I do not really know. The system I have did cost me 700 euros (about $819).

[jackt283]

Buying a g5 would be nice in so many ways. As you say, it is rock solid. A professional machine you can rely on to get the job done. And I agree with what you are saying about support being around for a long time. I'm not sure about 2010, but hey by that stage who is going to want one anyway with the {censored} they'll have out then.

 

But there are still several things leading me to getting an intel/amd. Cost of course is a large part of it. The G5 I get for $500 more than the intel, isn't going to be nearly as fast. There is no way I can get the amount of ram, hard drive space, graphics card, etc, on a G5 for under $2500. Even Second hand. Where you can easily do this on a PC for about $1000.

 

And of course games. I'm sick and tired of being stuck on the mac and having to wait for late releases, and being stuck with some stinkingly slow graphics card that seems to come stock standard with every low cost mac. Having a Windows dual boot would be awesome.

 

My idea at the moment is to go intel and *experiment* with OSx86. If there is no luck (hey could it really be slower than my eMac?), I'll switch to (dare I say it) Windows, and use that. Sph Sph... Sph. Hey if it does the job, use it.

 

Why is 2003 better than Xp?