Good PC WorldBench Scores for XP Mac

Today was a historic day at PC World. We benchmarked an iMac with WorldBench 5 for the first time.

The overall WorldBench 5 score for the iMac was 96, slightly at the low end of what we've seen for systems with the same processor, according to Senior Performance Analyst Elliott Kirschling.

To put this in perspective, an HP Compaq nx9420 that we recently tested, which had a slightly faster processor (2.16-GHZ Core Duo versus the iMac's 2-GHz Core Duo), garnered a Worldbench 5 score of 101, Elliott said. And an Acer TravelMate 8200 that had more RAM (2GB versus the iMac's 1GB) scored a 100.

In other tests, we put the system through our gaming benchmarking process yesterday. There's a chart showing comparative results in this story.

Basically, Windows XP under Boot Camp worked very well in these tests. In our Doom 3 and Far Cry benchmarks, the iMac ran neck and neck with a pair of notebook systems equipped with Intel Core Duo processors and similar graphics hardware.

Benchmarking a Mac PC with a true installation of Windows and true PC hardware was a significant moment here at PC World.

However, you may not see these Intel-based Macs showing up in the PC World Top 100 charts anytime soon. That's because the Test Center's current policy is only to test PCs as they arrive from the vendor with all the software installed. We don't normally test hardware that we have to install the operating system on.

One important side note: The Windows notebooks mentioned above completed our entire WorldBench 5 suite of tests. But, because of an incompatibilty with Boot Camp, two tests wouldn't run on the iMac. Both were versions of the 3ds Max test (a 3D modeling application). It's not that big a deal, but did lower the iMac's score a bit.