How accurate is Xbench ? I ran it on 5 Macbooks @ Compusa

Im thinking about getting a MacBook, so I went to Compusa to check them out. I ran Xbench on (5) Macbooks. See the image below. What I dont understand is the cheapest MacBook scored the highest.

wow, 23 views and no response. Is Xbench bogus?

If I told you exactly what I thought about XBench I would probably be banned from Mac Forums! I have seen similar results here with my many Macs. Sometimes it's different on the Same Machine!

Sad since it's the only real overall benchmark for OSX out there that checks everything.

I, for one, never really cared much about benchmarks for anything.
They're a bunch of numbers, big deal. :black:

So one computer is .981473987 milliseconds faster at doing something than another computer. Sure, with bar graphs and charts, this looks impressive and one computer is the winner!... but what does that really mean for me?... Nada. We are talking about microns, milliseconds and in many cases, when you get down to it, barely any difference that is able to be perceived by a human being at all :black:

What wins my attention isn't a list of numbers, but rather some real-world, hands on use. Something that I can actually see and experience and get live results from.
No benchmark, no matter how much eye candy and bar graphs it has, is going to be a substitute for that.

DB, I really agree with you. Show me some tests using real world Applications and I will listen! The thing though that bugs me the most about Xbench is it's results often make no sense as proved by his tests in that chart. I have seen the same thing, but throw some videos at the same machines and do conversion from one format to another and then you would see the faster machine do the conversion in a shorter time. I have long given up on Xbench and for that matter most synthetic benchmarks even in windows. They just don't tell the whole story.

i second that DB

Yeah I have my doubts too! The more ram i put in my macbook the lower score i got... even things that shouldnt be effected changed between tests... the hard drive always has the same top speed... esspeially when less than a year old...