Earlier this month, DailyTech reported on a brewing legal battle between Apple Inc. and a small Mac-clone startup, Psystar.  Later it was reported the whole site appeared to be a major sham and that the address it was registered to was a home address.

However, it appears to some extent that Psystar is on level as it shipped Engadget its newly renamed Psystar Open Computer. The system will allegedly soon ship to customers for $399.  After some hurried benchmarking, one thing appears clear -- Psystar is producing serious machines that can indeed run OS X, despite having some flaws.

The Psystar shipped to Engadget featured a Gigabyte motherboard with an Intel G31 Express chipset.  It features rather strong graphical power, using the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT.  The card is reported on the site to be 256 MB, but the shipped card actually featured 512 MB of memory -- and unexpected bonus.  The computer features a decent 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, similar to previous generation/low-end iMacs.

The box runs on OS X Leopard 10.5.2, build 9C31.  Currently Apple is on build, so this is slightly behind the curve.

Now for the bad and the ugly -- first, the machine has a very noisy fan setup.  The noise, likely exacerbated by a cheap case, is so loud that it is reportedly hard to make phone calls when the computer is in use.  Also, while Leopard is included with box, reinstalls do not appear to work, as it would not recognize the disk at boot.  Also the DHCP lease drops every 15 minutes, requiring a manual renew.

A couple more issues that aren't quite as severe include the fact that there is no iPhoto or iLife, as these don't come with Leopard, but are purchased separately.  Also, memory and audio don't properly show up in the Apple System Profiler.  This is not a horrible problem, as the memory and sound work fine,  but it might become a roadblock to upgrades.

The initial benchmarks show a rather solid performer.  In CPU tests, it only comes up short to the pricier Penryn-sporting MacBook Pros and 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.  In memory, its roughly meets or beats all Mac's desktop and notebook offerings, besides the high end 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.  Graphically it noticeably beats almost every Mac offering, notebook or otherwise, only being barely edged out by the 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.  Finally, hard drive performance is, unsurprisingly (due to rpm speeds) ahead of the notebooks from Apple, though it trails just slightly (and likely unnoticeably) behind Apple's desktop offerings.

Overall, if you can deal with the noise, the system seems to be a relatively good deal for those wanting a Mac.  Given that you can use boot camp to dual boot, likely (was not tested), this could be a good all around system with a Windows install for gaming. 

This said, the apparent small scale nature of the operation and looming threat of legal action from Apple offers a sort of Catch 22 for prospective buyers -- should they jump on it, despite fears that the setup might not be completely legitimate or production ready, before Apple can shut them down, or should they wait and make sure the company can actually deliver to customers, risking possibly missing the opportunity due to potential legal action from Apple.

A tough question indeed, but at least for now it appears like Psystar may be on level, and may actually be delivering a decent product and a lower price than Apple.