In previous posts I compared VMware Fusion and Innotek Virtualbox, and looked at how both of these running Windows XP measured up to native apps on my hackintosh. To complete the testing of the big three Virtual Machine packages I have run the same tests on Parallels. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently discovered Virtualbox, a free virtual machine client for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve had a chance to start some basic benchmarking of Virtualbox, so here are the results compared to VMware fusion. As a reminder, I’m running Mac OS 10.5.2 on a Core 2 Quad @3Ghz with 2Gb ram and a 500Mb Samsung HD501LJ hard drive.
The first test was boot time. Both apps were the only ones running on the Mac, with 512Mb memory allocated and one virtual processor. Windows XP Pro was the guest operating system, freshly installed with nothing extra but a virus checker added and all the latest Windows software updates. Time was measured from clicking the start button for the Virtual Machine to the appearance of the Windows desktop taskbar. VMware took 21 seconds, Virtualbox took 17 seconds. Fairly close, but impressive for the free Virtualbox to knock a few seconds off the commercial VMware. Read the rest of this entry »
I had a play with Garageband yesterday to test the hackintosh audio input, and I’m happy to report the MIC input is working fine. I made myself a mono ¼ inch to stereo 3.5mm cable and plugged my bass straight into the computer. Nice clean sound, and like many other aspects of this build it just worked. Many forum reports say it’s possible to get the digital output working if you want surround sound, but I’m not concerned with that at the moment.
The other area I started experimenting in was overclocking. From the default 2.4Ghz of the Q6600 I am currently running at a stable 3Ghz using only the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. The CPU appears to be multiplier locked at 9x so the only way to increase the speed is to increase the FSB. I have mine at 333Mhz for 9×333=3Ghz. The GA-P35-DS3R bios has an option to automatically control CPU and chipset voltages so I didn’t have to worry about raising these to get the board stable. Read the rest of this entry »
