Remember that “fake Mac” we showed you how to build a few days ago? Well, what if I told you that that same machine beat out a dual 2.66Ghz MacPro tower and a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro in a series of benchmark tests? Don’t go nuts: there are, as always, a few caveats. First off, it wasn’t really a fair fight: while the “hackintosh” was loaded up with 4GB of RAM, the MacPro sported only 1GB and the MacBook Pro a paltry 2GB. And as we all know, OS X is a memory hog, so take the following results with a rather large grain of salt. That said, Lifehacker decided to put all three machines through the paces with the Xbench Benchmarking tool and found that the fake Mac came out ahead in terms of an overall score. In real world tests–like transcoding music files, encoding video and compressing a file–the MacPro fared far better but the fake Mac still made a surprisingly strong showing. What do these tests tell us? Well, they tell us that a fairly capable Mac can be fashioned from commodity parts and a hacked OS. It would be nice to see the hackintosh go up against an Apple machine with similar specs though–then we could see what it’s really made of.

For more on the benchmarking tests:
– see this Lifehacker article