The title of the post is sure to bring a smile on the face of Steve Jobs. Here’s what took place. PC World folks went out on a MacBook Air test drive to see how it fared with some of the most powerful Windows 7 powered netbooks. Guess who got the winning prize, its none other than Apple’s MacBook Air which for some unknown reason isn’t placed in the netbook category by Apple.

MacBook Air benchmark

Macbook Air running Windows 7 and other high flying Windows 7 netbooks were put through a benchmarking process using PC World’s very own WorldBench 6 software:

Our WorldBench 6 software runs systems through a timed gantlet of popular consumer applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Mozilla Firefox, compiles the results, and spits out an overall score. The 11-inch Air earned a WorldBench 6 score of 74, very impressive given that the average WorldBench 6 score of the netbooks we’ve tested recently is 45.

Gamers with MacBook Air should be very happy to know that:

Even more impressive was the 11-inch Air’s performance in our gaming tests: Most netbooks can’t run 3D games like DiRT 2 and Call of Duty 4 at all, but the Air managed to sustain a frame rate of 23 frames per second while running COD4 at 1024 by 768 resolution and high graphic settings; much of the credit probably should go to the Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics card, which comes standard in every Air model.

The one area where Macbook Air lagged was in the battery life department where it only managed to last for 4 hours compared to average battery life of 6.5 hours for recent Windows netbooks.

From this benchmark, I think it is safe to say that if you are into netbook, go with the new MacBook Air as it offers  higher performance than its Windows counterparts. What conclusion do you draw from this benchmark?