The Performance Edge: Eeny Meeny, Miney Moe
- All The New G4 Towers Go Toe To Toe - A Performance Report
Thursday,
March 21, 2002
We finally have benchmark results for all three
of the new Tower Power Macs. In general, the results confirm
our feelings about each one of these machines.
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The 800 MHz is great for those on a budget,
who will use the machine for more light duty activity in general,
and only have need for more processing muscle occasionally.
The 800 will be plenty fast for you, and you'll get to keep
$700 in your pocket for other goodies.
The G4/933 is the best bet for those that need
moderate amounts of processing bandwidth on a more regular
basis, but don't use their machines in a production type manner.
At the moment very few applications are written to take advantage
of dual processors as a matter of course. So in the near term,
unless you are going to be running multiple processor intensive
applications at once, a high-powered single processor machine
will suit you just fine.
If you are in a production type environment,
or the applications you want to use, either are already tuned
for dual processor machines or soon will be, the Dual Processor
Tower is the machine for you. It will pay for itself in saved
time, and more than justifies the $700 premium that you will
pay for it. You will have to do some planning to see how best
to harness all the power you will have underneath the hood.
But this machine should be a real boon in a production type
environment where you can be running several processor intensive
applications at once - your productivity could soar.
Hardcore gamers will want to look at the two
fastest machines. And in this arena, if Giants is a forbearer
of things to come, those for whom gaming is a religion, may
want to plunk down the extra brass for the dual processor
machine. We achieved and average of 46 fps with Giants
on the dual processor machine, and only 26 fps on the 933
- though they have the same graphics card.
The tests below are from our suite of real world application
tests. These tests feature a diverse selection of applications
commonly used by the Mac community. The test suite was designed
to render an accurate and well rounded picture of a machine's
performance. All of the tests below, except for the game tests,
were timed with a stopwatch. The times are then converted
to percentages relative to the Power Mac G4/800, which is
set to 100%. For all scores, higher numbers are better.
Not sure why the Dual processor machine turned in poorer
performance here. Perhaps more code needs to load to accommodate
the extra processor. Time difference was only about 3 seconds.
The 933 MHz and Dual Processor machines have
the same drive for burning CDs. They both burn CDs at 8X.
The 800 MHz machine burns CDs at 24X. If you are mainly going
to be burning CDs (and not DVDs), do yourself a favor and
drop the SuperDrive
from whatever machine you get.. You'll burn faster and save
yourself $200 by dropping the DVD-R drive, in favor of a CD-RW
one. The CD burning process is not a processor intensive task.
The test above creates and destroys 1,000
windows. See the Let1kWindowsBloom
site for more info. The speed improvement of the two faster
machines is probably due mostly to the better graphics card
installed in each machine
Large document is scrolled from one end to the other using
Classic OS 9.2.2 when booted in OS 10. Both of the faster
machines have the same graphics cards.
This test takes place in a large AppleWorks
document. Here you can see the 800 MHz suffering a disproportionate
performance hit because of its lack of a L3 backside cache
Only one processor at a time was used on the
dual processor machine. It does not appear that the indexing
function of Sherlock is multi-threaded.
However the 800 MHz is hit again in the performance solar
plexus by that lack of a L3 cache
The Fractal
program has been highly tuned to take advantage of the G4
and is precisely the type of work that the G4 was made for.
It will also gobble up whatever processing capability is present.
Now why can't all processor intensive tasks take advantage
of the dual processor machine like this one does?
Both of the faster machines have the SuperDrive
and thus read data from and to the CD at the same speed. The
800 MHz machine reads data faster than the other two, but
in this case processing speed trumps optical drive speed
For the above results we fired up two copies of QuickTime
and ran two encodes, one on each processor at the same time
(something that cannot be done under OS 9). Need to do this
type of heavy duty rendering on a regular basis? Run, don't
walk, to the nearest dual processor machine you can find!
Same as previous only a different type of encode ... one
that is multitasking even on one processor. I think we are
beginning to see a pattern here as far as the multiprocessor
machine is concerned
Again here the Dual Processor machine really shines, even
though the 933 has the same graphics card. Giants is a game
that has been developed to take advantage of dual processors
.... let's hope that all developers begin to take this kind
of care in developing their products.
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