Here's a tale of how a humble Mac Mini system outperformed cutting-edge quad-core system. It’s also a story of how Apple can’t write good software for the Windows platform.

The other day I was chatting to George Ou about professional grade digital SLR cameras that offer 1080p video capability. He then mentioned how his system (an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz PC system with an NVIDIA 8800GT GPU) couldn’t handle 1080p H.264 QuickTime movies.

Thinking that it might be an issue with his system, I downloaded some test clips and tried playing them with Apple QuickTime on my 3.0GHz quad-core QX9650 Vista 64-bit system - This rig is kitted out with Velociraptor drives, 8GB of fast RAM and a Crossfire quad-GPU setup. The results - Awful. The clip was jerky and juddery, and while not technically unwatchable, I really didn’t want to spend too long looking at it.

Note: If you want some sample 1080p H.264 QuickTime movies to try out at home then check out this page and scroll to the bottom for the clips we are using.

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