Hands-On Review: Mac OS X 10.6.1--Speed increase?

In my review of Mac OS X 10.6, I noted that the biggest disappointment of Snow Leopard was the reduced speed of the graphics drivers for the red hot (sadly with Windows only!) EVGA GeForce 285 GTX for the Mac. Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.1 yesterday with a newer graphics driver set (1.6.2 vs 1.6.0) so, of course, my hopes were raised that the performance of the GeForce 285 GTX would at least increase to the level achieved under Leopard 10.5.7.

Here are the results of the graphics re-tests under 10.6.1::

Mac OS X 10.6.1 Graphics Speed Tests (Higher is faster)

Test/Graphics Card	EVGA GeForce GTX 285	EVGA GeForce GTX 285	EVGA GeForce GTX 285
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version	10.6.1	10.6	10.5.7
Cinebench R10 Rendering (8x)	18470	18516	18768
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	5979	6018	5961
Xbench 1.3
- Quartz Graphics	227	227	239
- OpenGL Graphics	94	93	177
-User Interface Graphics	341	352	406
GAME TESTS
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	913	903	970
Halo 2.0.3 (frames/sec)	123	122	124

Red is faster.

In almost all cases, the scores are still higher (red) under Leopard and some are significantly higher. There are no significant speed differences between Mac OS X 10.6.1 and 10.6.

It is too early to tell if the issues that I noted below with Apple Mail in 10.6 have been resolved. [Bill Fox]

[9/1-2] Updated(3) Some problems with Snow Leopard's Mail 4.0 and a fix

So far the only problems that I've had with Snow Leopard (SL), Mac OS X 10.6, is with its version of Apple Mail (4.0 Build 1075/1075.2). Most have been transitory but one was permanent and for that one I have a fix.

- Unable to send POP account email. After installing Snow Leopard I was unable to send POP email via the outgoing (SMTP) email server for my Cox cable internet connection. This had never happened before and the Cox connection has been great about allowing me to send emails from all of my POP email accounts the via their server. Fortunately, this was easily fixed by setting a custom port as 25 rather than using the default.

Here is the fix:

(Mail menu>Preferences>Accounts>Select the specific account>Outgoing Mail Server popup menu>Edit SMTP server list>Select the specific server>Advanced button>Click Use custom port button>Type '25' in field>Click the OK button).

[Update 1: Several readers also using Cox have confirmed this problem and fix. Apple released a Support Note on this issue and an allied issue involving the correct Authentication (TS2998)]

- Exchange account losing server. Several times my Microsoft Exchange email account would not send email and the server popup menu appeared on the message under the Subject field and to the right of the account field with the selection "None." Each time this happened I opened the preferences for the Exchange account and no Outgoing Mail Server was selected. I simply re-selected the Exchange server and everything was fine for awhile.

- Mail (or Keychain) keeps "forgetting" POP email accounts password. The passwords to access my email accounts have been stored in Keychain for years. But for some reason, SL Mail has frequently kicked out messages requiring me to re-enter my password and click the box to store it in Keychain. It happens when Mail automatically checks for new mail. I remember this happening but very rarely previous to SL and only to one account at a time.

- Extraneous Draft email in the Drafts folder. That's where they belong, of course, but in this case the email had already been sent for some time before it suddenly and surprisingly appeared as a "Draft" in the Drafts folder. So far the errant drafts are exclusively from my Exchange account and I've just checked to see that they are already in the Sent folder and then deleted them. [Update 2: I've discovered that this happens when I am drafting an email and Mail 4.0 loses connectivity with the Exchange server, popping up a message to that effect. The draft does not disappear when the email is sent like it is supposed to. Otherwise, the draft function appears to work properly.]

Update 3: - Strange font handling. I noticed and several readers also wrote me that the font preference selections in SL's Apple Mail 4.0 do not work as expected.

First, many emails are received with the font being very tiny regardless of what font is selected for messages in Mail 4.0's preferences. I have selected Verdana 16 for messages which makes these emails a barely readable size but which also makes my outgoing emails to have abnormally large fonts.

Second, incoming emails frequently do not display in the preference-selected font regardless of my preferences selection. For example, if I send someone an email using Verdana 16 font and they respond, my outgoing email font appended to their response has changed from Verdana 16 to Tahoma 13 in the header and to New Times Roman 16 in the body. Curiously, my signature block shows as Verdana 16 as originally written and as selected in Mail 4.0 preferences.

I am not sure how general these problems are. But they are not specific to the servers that I have to deal with given the reader responses. [Bill Fox]