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Thu, 27 Aug 2009 Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard benchmarks

Macworld Lab tests Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to see how much faster it truly makes your Mac run

James Galbraith, Macworld

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Apple describes Snow Leopard as a top-to-bottom refinement of existing features. One major goal of those refinements: Improved performance.

Snow Leopard aims to run leaner and faster on current and recent Macs, in part by dropping support for legacy Power PC systems and focusing solely on Intel-powered Macs. And while some of Snow Leopard’s potential performance gains won’t show up until software developers optimize their applications for the new OS, others are apparent right now.

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To check the performance benefits, we tested Snow Leopard on three different systems: a 20-inch iMac Core 2 Duo/2.66GHz with 2GB of RAM; a 3GHz Xeon 5300 eight-core Mac Pro with 4GB of RAM (this Mac Pro was released in April 2007); and a 15-inch MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo/2.8GHz with 4GB of RAM.

The hard drives in each system were partitioned into two equal sizes, and we installed Leopard (OS 10.5.8) on one partition and Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) on the other. We booted into one OS, timed different tasks, then rebooted into the other OS and clocked those same tasks.

Here's a chart showing the percentage speed boosts (above 100%) or speed reductions (below 100%) we found when upgrading a system from Leopard to Snow Leopard. A score of 100% indicates that the test took the same time on both systems.

See also:

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard review

NEXT: What’s faster in Snow Leopard

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Comments received


Elliot Richards said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

Hmmm, somewhat interesting. I have the '07 Mac Pro with 8GB RAM, but I suspect a lot of Mac Pro users are running Pro Apps like Final Cut Studio, Logic, Creative Suite etc. I'd love to see audio/video benchmarks and I'm sure these will come. Reading this it seems little point for me to venture into town for Snow Leopard on the 28th.

iHuff said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

I'd like to see some comparisons on older machines - for example a late 2006 2Ghz C2D Macbook running Tiger. What performance benefits will I see? (aside from the O/S enhancements and compatability gains)

Tim said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

How about comparisons on Core Duo (as opposed to Core2 Duo) - from what I've read there doesn't sound like there will be any speed improvement on these older machines?

Pradumn said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

I think it would be quite interesting to see how Snow Leopard works with Virtualisation - with Bootcamp and something like VMWare Fusion/Parallels

Ah-ha said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

And still the iPhones burst into flames!

There's definitely said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

a very poor standard of trolling here.

Archie said on Thu, 27 Aug 2009

Well I guess when you are so low down that's all you'll get.

Alex said on Fri, 28 Aug 2009

does the compressor test ran on 8core(qmaster) or just 2core? Macbook Pro 2.8 (08:56) vs Mac Pro (7:45), doesn't sounds correct!

Mack Tosh said on Sat, 12 Sep 2009

Notice.... Only stuff you do on the finder is faster, because it is now 64 bit. Most decent programs have been 64 bit for a while. So, no speed bump (Photoshop, iMovie, Logic, Final Cut, Compressor, etc.).

liam Taylor said on Fri, 18 Sep 2009

hay something seriously is wrong with the tests the mac pro 8 core test with compressor takes almost the same time as the dual core macs 8 core's = about a 600%-700% speed up in compression.
id rely like to know if the 8 cores are used more efficiently in 10.6 than 10.5

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