Mountain Lion Much Faster on C2D (UPDATE! Benchmarks)

[TehFalcon]

Mountain Lion has brought so much life back into my Early 2008 MacBook Pro It Seems. Everything is much much faster, boot is amazingly fast, 2-4 second boot from the spin wheel under the apple logo boot, and everything just feels less sluggish. Seems us older C2D Users are having less issues and more speed increases than the newer Macs. I'd say an 70% Speed increase here.


Seems Mountain Lion is the snow leopard for Lion. Some Features added and everything optimized!

Update:

I and a Friend have done Benchmarking on Mountain Lion and Lion on my Early 2008 MBP and a New 2011 iMac. The MBP has an SSD and the iMac Does NOT.

MBP:

Lion:

NO Geekbench or XBench yet

Mountain Lion:

No XBench

iMac:

Lion:

No XBench

Mountain Lion:

No XBench

Seems Disk Speed went down on the iMac but General Performance went up on Mountain Lion, but with the MacBook Pro everything went up, we will get XBench and the MacBook Pro's Geekbench up soon!

Mountain Lion is Faster! May Be some kind of bug thats causing disk speed on newer Macs Hard Drives to go down.

 

[lmsolutionsapp]

Did you test with the new Mac pro i5/i7?

 

[Krazy Bill]

I see little difference. Maybe a second or 2 in boot.

If you clean installed ML that would explain your misplaced zeal. Give it a few months to bog down with clutter like your previous OS.

 

[thundersteele]

my 2008 C2D takes almost 2 minutes to boot. But I didn't do a clean install, so it's probably a big mess!

 

[TehFalcon]

I Did a clean install, just as I Did with Lion. Mountain lion IS just faster, I Have done several tests and Mountain Lion IS Faster, I Dont know what else I Can say, But it is.

 

[Ddyracer]

I Did a clean install, just as I Did with Lion. Mountain lion IS just faster, I Have done several tests and Mountain Lion IS Faster, I Dont know what else I Can say, But it is.

I believe you.

 

[MacManiac76]

I Did a clean install, just as I did with Lion. Mountain lion is just faster. I Have done several tests and Mountain Lion is faster. I Don't know what else I can say, but it is.

If anything Mountain Lion may be optimized to run better on an SSD drive compared to Lion. The speed increases you are seeing have everything to do with the SSD you have in your system and nothing to do with it being a Core 2 Duo processor.

 

[Krazy Bill]

I Have done several tests and Mountain Lion IS Faster, I Dont know what else I Can say, But it is.

Can you quantify those tests and post them here? I use it as well and just don't see it. Perhaps that's because I have an SSD.

 

[kageon1]

I Did a clean install, just as I Did with Lion. Mountain lion IS just faster, I Have done several tests and Mountain Lion IS Faster, I Dont know what else I Can say, But it is.

Are the animations smoother (compared to Lion) like the transitions into Launchpad, opening folders in Launchpad, scrolling in windows and pages, and Mission Control? Lion just feels so slow on my Mid-2010.

 

[cubbie5150]

hmmph...It figures, since my MBP (has the ATI X1600 video card) won't be supported in ML.

 

[haravikk]

2-4 second boot from the spin wheel under the apple logo boot

I thought someone said the spin wheel was removed in Mountain Lion? Anyway, I just wanted to add that when I updated to Lion I added an SSD to my Mac Pro as a startup volume, and I see the same 2-4 second boot time once the Apple Logo appears with spin-wheel, so I'm not sure if Mountain Lion is having any affect for your there.

However, I fully believe that it may feel smoother, as Apple has been claiming to have made a huge overhaul to the graphics systems, which could have a big impact on the performance of animations and the user-interface in general. Like Quartz etc. did ages ago

 

[JuicyJones]

Ssd

I have a current generation 13' Macbook Pro, 8gb Ram, and a 256 Solid State. After running tests on Black Magic, I've been consistently getting 9-13mbs per second faster than I have ever gotten. A coworker of mine with the i7 11' Air said that he is getting about 8mbs per second faster than he's gotten before. I'm assuming 10.8 is optimized on SSDs.

 

[Krazy Bill]

I have a current generation 13' Macbook Pro, 8gb Ram, and a 256 Solid State. After running tests on Black Magic, I've been consistently getting 9-13mbs per second faster than I have ever gotten. A coworker of mine with the i7 11' Air said that he is getting about 8mbs per second faster than he's gotten before. I'm assuming 10.8 is optimized on SSDs.

I'm still not seeing this on my Crucial M4. It's about the same.

Like anything else, I suppose if a lot of people keep saying this as fact then we'll all convince ourselves that ML is faster. We need to wait for concrete benchmark tests to be performed by one of the tech blogs. Their results might show a few nanoseconds here and there but I bet it won't be much.

 

[TehFalcon]

Ive Done a comparison and it seems with a clean install on Lion I Get a 6-7 Second boot time from Spin Wheel, with Mountain Lion clean install it has gone down to 2-4 Second from spin wheel, the spin wheel is still there for me so I Dont know why anyone would say it was removed, as I dont see why it would be anyway, Also All Animations are definitely smoother, Launchpad, Dashboard (I Dont use it as a space), along with momentum scrolling.


I Do have an SSD in this machine, but its no impressive SSD, just a cheap $100 120gb Vertex Plus SATA 2. I Get a SSD Speed Increase along with less disk space usage. ML is Snappy!! It general feels faster than Lion.

 

[TehFalcon]

Added Benchmarks for 2011 iMac and my Early 2008 MBP w/ SSD. Working on getting XBench and Geekbench for Lion on the MBP.

 

[SDVDR]

Mountain Lion IS Faster than Lion

Mountain Lion has brought so much life back into my Early 2008 MacBook Pro It Seems. Everything is much much faster, boot is amazingly fast, 2-4 second boot from the spin wheel under the apple logo boot, and everything just feels less sluggish. Seems us older C2D Users are having less issues and more speed increases than the newer Macs. I'd say an 70% Speed increase here.


Seems Mountain Lion is the snow leopard for Lion. Some Features added and everything optimized!

Update:

I and a Friend have done Benchmarking on Mountain Lion and Lion on my Early 2008 MBP and a New 2011 iMac. The MBP has an SSD and the iMac Does NOT.

MBP:

Lion:

NO Geekbench or XBench yet

Image

Mountain Lion:

No XBench

Image

Image


iMac:

Lion:

No XBench

Image

Image

Mountain Lion:

No XBench

Image

Image



Seems Disk Speed went down on the iMac but General Performance went up on Mountain Lion, but with the MacBook Pro everything went up, we will get XBench and the MacBook Pro's Geekbench up soon!

Mountain Lion is Faster! May Be some kind of bug thats causing disk speed on newer Macs Hard Drives to go down.

The iMac in the picture is mine. It boots MUCH faster on Mountain Lion. Not a "2-4 second increase." It boots probably seven seconds faster. General operation is not much faster, but it is notable. As you see, the disk speed is actually slower. But the boot speed is notably faster. Note that it is only a Developer Build of Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, therefore it may be a bit slower than the final version, obviously.

 

[nicknyhk]

I tried it on my macbook 2008 13" aluminium (non pro) 2.4 ghz c2d with 4 gb ram and the standard 250GB 5400 rpm hdd. Not sure about normal operations but boot up feels just as slow as lion. After a cold reboot, apps take slightly faster to open than mountain lion, but i noticed that if i were to close the app and open it some time later, it opens much much faster.

 

[limo79]

@WAM2: Could you compare battery life and bottom enclosure temperature on MBP Early 2008 platform?

Just simple test: fully charged MBP connected to AC, boot OS X, wait 5 minutes, unplug AC adapter, wait 5 minutes and note remaining battery time (keyboard backlit off, LCD brightness half).

Regarding benchmark results you should run it let's say 10 times and approximate results. One time pass is not enough, because results vary (especially in X Bench).

 

[scottsjack]

Mountain Lion sounds encouraging. With a 7200RPM HD and 8GB RAM my late 2008 MBP is about as pumped up as it can be. Lion is definitely slower feeling than Snow Leopard and the mess called Windows 8. I'm looking forward to installing ML.

 

[Patrick J]

I'm excited for this update for my 2009 13" Macbook Pro.

Waiting for a more mature release to install though.

 

[theanimaster]

Can anyone confirm ML performance on a mac that DOESN'T have a SSD?

 

[jimmy43]

I've had ML installed on my MBP 4,1 (Early 2008 2.4 C2 4GB + Intel SSD) for a few days now. I did a clean install Also did not import anything with the migration assistant..

So far:
- 0 Crashes
- 0 App incompatibilities (with ~20-30 non-standard apps installed). I had to turn off Gatekeeper, but overall all apps are stable and no crashes. All built in apps work great, including Messages.
- Faster overall in performing tasks. For example, going to sleep takes 2 seconds whereas before (in SL) it would take 4-5. Also shutting down is almost instant, and startup is noticeably improved.
- Graphics performance is slightly worse. Mission Control is a bit chunky, window openings are choppy, etc. But it's not super distracting, maybe running at 10-15fps instead of 30+. I've read reports that CoreImage is buggy in ML, so hopefully an update will resolve this.
- Tried playing Starcraft 2 and it works fine, get good stable FPS, so the 3d video card performance / drivers seems fine.
- Safari 6 is ridiculously fast. I would say about 2x faster than Chrome in SL.

Overall, I would recommend this upgrade to Early 2008 MBP owners. It will probably be the last OS upgrade, so might as well take the plunge! Hope that helps some peeps

Can anyone confirm ML performance on a mac that DOESN'T have a SSD?

Sorry, mine has an SSD so I can't help you, but if you had a spare $100 bux.. it's a great way to juice up that old MBP!

 

[mikebinstock]

Early 2008 Macbook pro with HDD and Mountain Lion

Can anyone confirm ML performance on a mac that DOESN'T have a SSD?

Did anyone try this machine with Mountain lion and if so how did it work?

Stock Hard drive reviews only. Thank you very much for your help.

Mike

 

[rob86s]

Can anyone confirm ML performance on a mac that DOESN'T have a SSD?

In addition to that , can someone tell me if the mountain lion is a good option for me ? as currently running snow leopard , and find my 2008 iMac c2d 2.8ghz 4 gb 320 gb running very smooth . Wouldn't like to update and end up with sluggish machine.
Regards