Gizmodo has got its hands on a Psystar machine - you know, the Mac clone people (delivered from their order, one takes it) and run it through some benchmarks, which suggest that the CPU runs at the same speed as a CPU of the same speed in a Mac (are we surprised? No) but that a better video card gives better performace. (Again, surprised? No.)
The point of course being that the Psystar machine is a fair bit cheaper for that better video performance.
And, it seems, a lot louder. I said, LOUDER. The fans don't link to the sensors on the processor and surround, it seems. Or as Gizmodo notes,
It's LOUD. Crazy loud. OS X doesn't seem to interface with the fan controller, so it runs at full tilt all the time. It doesn't really come across on the video, but it's loud enough so that it's hard to talk on the phone when the machine is running. There's no way we could deal with this thing on a daily basis.
One thing that seems odd is that
The included copy of Leopard was out of the shrinkwrap, but there's no way to install it -- it shows up in Startup Disk but it won't restart, and it's not recognized at boot.
Which could be a problem if your hard drive goes south. How you gonna reinstall your OS? How will you restore from a backup if you can't boot from a CD? Can you boot from an external mirror disk?
The comments are interesting too, such as
The OS has nothing to do with fan speed control (in the BIOS based systems at least), nor should they, because the BIOS is perfectly capable of monitoring temps and controlling fan speeds. Its obvious that Psystar didnt do any modifications to the system, literally dropped in all the parts like any of your corner stores, and loaded a disk image onto your hard drive. That noise could be solved by enabling a simple QFan setting on the MB. or... They could have cut sound output by 80% just by using a Scythe Ninja, along with some low rpm fans, which would have added about 50 bucks to the cost of this system.
Find your own favourites, or browse the System Profiler file (note: SPX Zip format, whatever that is - video?).
Now we come to the dog that hasn't barked in this long dark night of the soul: Apple. Is it going to sue Psystar for breaking the EULA on Leopard by installing it on non-Apple hardware? Or is that an empty threat - in which case, might Dell start doing the same, for example? (Someone post the idea on Ideastorm, quick. Oh, someone already has....)
