Macintosh 1992 vs Macintosh
1999 - "We've Come A Long Way Baby"
Millennium
vs
Quadra
Periodically at MacSpeedZone we like to compare the fastest
machine for which we have results to the slowest machine for
which we have results. We were given a Daystar Millennium
G3/400 to play with (the fastest Macintosh you can buy today)
and thought it would be fun to compare it's performance and
features to the Quadra 900 (the high-end machine of it's time)
the slowest machine for which we had MacBench 4.0 results.
It is interesting to compare the areas where computers have
gotten much faster (Processor and FPU) and where they still
lag (drive and graphics). First we present a features comparison
and then the benchmarks. Enjoy yourself!
-
Quadra 900
Daystar Millennium G3/400
Introduction Date
1991
Late 1998
Cost
Initial Retail Price: $8,500
Today Used: $175
$5,299
Processor
68040/25
G3/420 (XLR8 Mach Speed G3/400 Upgrade Card clocked
to 420Mhz)
L2 Cache
None
1MB Backside Cache
RAM
4MB expandable to 256MB
64MB expandable to 1.5GB
VRAM
1MB
4MB (accelerator card)
Drive
160MB SCSI
4.5GB SCSI 2
Drive Bays
1
10
Expansion Slots
5 NuBus, 1 PDS
6 PCI
Benchmarks
The benchmarks below were obtained with MacBench
4.0 and scores represent the percentage of improvement over
the Quadra 900 which receives a score of 100%
Millennium 54 and a half times as fast as
the Quadra in Processor score
Millennium 86 times as fast as the Quadra
in Floating Point score
Millennium 5 times as fast as the Quadra in
Disk score
Millennium 13 times as fast as the Quadra
in Graphics score
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