Marco.org

It’s good overall, but their benchmarks are suspicious. Most of the results seem illogical, knowing about the underlying hardware similarities. I also would have used 2 GB of RAM for any OS X benchmark, since I’d never recommend any users running on less for heavy use (Photoshop, video editing, heavy multitasking, etc.).

Expressing surprise at the iMac’s performance edge over the similar-hardware MacBook Pro, the reviewer says, “The only major differences are the hard drive (the laptop has a 5400rpm drive) and video cards.” This is true, but the hard drive difference is significant: rotational speed makes laptop drives seem misleadingly fast. Even a 7200 RPM laptop hard drive is nowhere near the performance of a 7200 RPM desktop drive. And with only 1 GB of RAM, the frequent swapping would amplify hard drive deficiencies.

The Conclusions page also has this odd quote:

“The benchmark results also indicate how much of a difference an extra core makes, as the older Core Duo iMac received a beatdown that wasn’t indicative of the 570MHz difference in clock speed.”

An extra core? Between a Core Duo 1.86 and a Core 2 Duo 2.4? Does the reviewer think that “Core 2” adds an extra core somewhere? That’s a little scary coming from a respectable tech publication.