Windows 8 versus speed with OS X Mountain Lion

Microsoft's operating system has faster boot speed and performance in some reviews but takes longer to shut down than competitors.

Windows 8 versus speed with OS X Mountain Lion Picture 1
OS X and Mountain Lion all tend to be closer to mobile devices.

Mac OS Mountain Lion (10.8) was released a few months ago by Apple and many users were able to experience it while Windows 8 was not officially available. However, the almost completed version of RTM has begun to reach manufacturers as well as being shared on network forums. Both have new handy features and especially improved speed compared to the old version.

The Pcmag page performs a comparison of the processing speeds of these two operating systems by installing Windows 8 RTM 64 bit versions on the MacBook Pro 2012 version with the configuration including a 2.9 GHz Core i7 chip, RAM 8 GB capacity with Boot Camp. The installation process is quite fast and the drivers for the device work well on the new version of Windows. However, it is certain that Apple's operating system will have an advantage over its competitors thanks to better hardware compatibility right from the start of production.

Windows 8 versus speed with OS X Mountain Lion Picture 2

OS X 10.8 is getting smoother while Windows 8 has an eye-catching Metro interface.

For start-up and shutdown times, the test is repeated several times to get the average and all wait for the machine to turn off for a while before restarting or the computer is completely restarted to calculate the time. Surprisingly, Microsoft's operating system booted up faster than Mountain Lion, even though the shutdown time was twice as high. In addition, Windows 8 also quickly switches to sleep mode if set before pressing the power key.

Meanwhile, when it comes to ripping a CD (transferring music files on a disc to a computer) with an iTunes program, both on Windows and OS X, the time on Apple's operating system is faster but not really significant . Meanwhile, with performance tests on Mozilla Fireox, Microsoft's operating system also proved to be superior.

Table comparing the processing speed of these two operating systems (green box is better):

Operating system / evaluation criteria

Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Windows 8 RTM

Boot (unit: seconds), lower is better

26.9

19.6

Shutdown (unit: seconds), lower is better

5.5

11.9

Compressing CDs with iTunes, lower is better.

3:42

3:47

Geekbench 2.2 64-bit, higher is better

8,706

10,068

Geekbench 2.2 32-bit, higher is better

7,918

7,549

SunSpider on Firefox 15 (milliseconds, lower is better)

167

158

SunSpider on Safari / IE10

156

105

Mozilla Kraken 1.1 on Firefox 15 (ms, lower is better)

2,510

2,301

Mozilla Kraken 1.1 in Safari / IE10 (ms, lower is better)

2,427

4,352

Psychedelic Browsing on Firefox (RPM, higher is better)

1,062

5,709

Psychedelic Browsing on Safari / IE10 (RPM, higher is better)

3,645

7.224

Large file copy time (unit: seconds), lower is better

23.2

26.6