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Archive for the Category » Benchmarking/Performance «

Target Display Mode And Thunderbolt

Friday, July 1st, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Target Display Mode on the Late 2009 and 2010 iMacs was a pretty neat trick; you connected the iMac to another Mac via the Mini Display Port connector and the iMac’s display became a second monitor for the first mac while the system ran “headless” underneath it. When you unplugged the cable, the iMac’s display reverted back to the iMac itself.

The Thunderbolt port in the 2011 iMacs adds a couple of twists to this setup. First, when using Thunderbolt-equipped iMac as a display, you need to hit Command-F2 to switch the display between the iMac and the other Mac. This, however, is a relatively minor inconvenience or even a benefit, depending on how you generally use your iMac.

Another wrinkle comes in the form of what computer can connect to which iMac with which cable. To determine this we Article Continues…

Thunderbolt Via Target Disk Mode

Friday, July 1st, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

Several weeks ago when Apple released the first Thunderbolt-equipped Mac, the questions started pouring in on how quickly we’d be able to see the benefits of blazing external speeds.

Interestingly enough, no thunderbolt cables were even available until earlier this week when Apple started offering the Promise Technology Pegasus R4 & R6 RAID solutions. Now that the cables were available – we had to get our hands on a few to start answering the questions we’ve received in detail.

The first question we aimed to tackle came from Jay:

“Could I use a new 2011 Macbook Pro in Target Disk Mode over Thunderbolt? Wouldn’t it act just like an external hard drive enclosure?”

Logically, sure!  Target disk mode allows one Mac with FireWire (or now with Thunderbolt) to be used as an external hard disk connected to another computer. Article Continues…

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 For Mac Benchmarked

Friday, June 3rd, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

Our friends over at Bare Feats are at it again, benchmarking away. In a post today, they’ve found the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac helps speed things up while running Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

Added to their performance findings from February while benchmarking with Kronos, Squeeze, Color, and Colorista II; the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac is a clear favorite for professional video and graphics design.

For the complete details, visit www.barefeats.com

MacBook Pro 2011 Models and SATA 3.0 (6.0Gb/s) – Update – 5/27/2011

Friday, May 27th, 2011 | Author: OWC Larry

Since we first looked at a potential fix for problems with SATA 3.0 operation in the main bay of the 2011 MacBook Pros on April 15, we’ve learned much more.

It’s not so sweet at this point, but I will at least try to keep it as short as possible.

Before going any further, I do want to be clear that, while I believe the issues noted should be and will be resolved, Apple makes no advertisement—in specification or otherwise—that creates any obligation for them to fix the issues noted. Again, I do believe they will… I also believe it is in everyone’s best interest that they do fix it, with respect to the incredible performance that our SSDs unleash in these fantastic MacBook Pro 2011 models. If we’re lucky, it will be a fix handled via some software update; it would seem more likely to require a hardware adjustment, but we’ll see. FWIW, our shielding kit does make a difference for some, but not all, as there is just significant enough variability in the issue which means it ultimately needs to be resolved by Apple themselves.

Ok… To the details… Article Continues…

2011 iMac Benchmark Testing With the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD

Thursday, May 5th, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

What a whirlwind of information these new iMacs have been creating. Just a few hours after the machines were released, we had five out of the six base models unboxed and going through our gamut of tests.

We were shocked when we installed our new OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSDs only to find that Apple had essentially throttled the internal SATA connections on the latest Z68 chipset from Intel to 3Gb/s speeds when the Z68 chipset itself could accommodate up to two SATA Revision 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports and up to four SATA Revision 2.0 (3Gb/s) ports. News of this travesty rocked the Mac community - even one of our Twitter followers heard the news and tweeted Phil Schiller directly.

Shortly after the news spread far and wide, Apple released iMac EFI Update 1.6 and two SATA Revision 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports were available on the latest iMac and all was right in the world again.

We fired up the machines, installed the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD and started our testing again. As promised, here is a glimpse of our initial benchmark testing… Article Continues…

2011 iMacs: No SATA 6Gb/s, Yes to Multiple Drives

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

With the unboxing completed, our Lab Team is hard at work testing compatibilities and seeing just how much upgrading can be done to the new line of 2011 iMac models released today.

We’ve been getting several questions on the prior posts today asking about the internal SATA bus speed on the new machines. While the processor was bumped up to the Sandy Bridge line, the bus speeds on the iMac are still SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s), just like the previous models.

Just to make it clear:
The 2011 iMac does not have ANY
SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) connections.

Which means your best bet for upgrading to a Solid State Drive (or three) is still the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro and, if employing a RAID array, the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro RE series of drives.

With the physical build of the 2011 27″ iMac being so similar to the 2010 Apple iMac 27″ models, we are hard at work developing the necessary adjustments to add the new 27″ iMac to the OWC Turnkey Upgrade Program – including the external eSATA port option. Keep an eye out here for the official release soon.

***UPDATE 5/5/11***

Apple released a firmware update as of today’s date that gives both the 21.5″ and 27″ models TWO 6Gb/s data channels. See our blog post for more details:

http://blog.macsales.com/10050-firmware-update-enables-6gbs-in-2011-imacs

Testing: RAID 0 in a MacBook Pro using the Data Doubler.

Friday, April 29th, 2011 | Author: OWC Duane

Among the different configuration options available when using the OWC Data Doubler in your MacBook or MacBook Pro is setting both drives to function as a RAID 0 (striped) array. This combines both drives (the one in the Data Doubler equipped optical bay and the one in the original hard drive bay) into a single volume, which provides an increase in data access speed.

Since we’ve had several questions about this, we decided to put this configuration to the test by using different combinations of hard drives and SSDs to determine which offered the best balance of price, capacity and performance.

Our test machine was a 2011 13″ MacBook Pro (MacBookPro8,1) with a 2.3GHz Intel Core 5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Inside, we replaced the optical drive with an OWC Data Doubler to allow us to utilize a second drive.

Article Continues…

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive Used To Set Overclocking World Record

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing today announced its OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive was an integral component of a test rig that established a world record in the PCMark Vantage overall point category for a Quad Core system. The SSD Review HWBot Overclocking team, headed by Paul Alcorn, a storage specialist and overclocker who specializes in RAID/SSD performance benchmarking, eclipsed the former world record of 33271 points with a first submission high score of 34311.0 marks.

What It Takes To Set A Record

Approximately 30,452 competitors compete over a wide range of benchmarks in an ‘overclockers league’ maintained by HWBot.org. Millions of benchmarks have been run and submitted to Futuremark databases, a central verification system. Once the results are verified with Futuremark, an ‘overclocker’ is able to submit to HWBot.org.

“We chose the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD for our world record attempt because its 28% over provisioning ensures much better performance over many runs Article Continues…