We are following up our our first
look at the performance of the new Power Mac Dual
G4/1 GHz machine, with a more detailed look. This time
we add in the single processor G4/867 from the last
generation Power Mac to the mix. We also expand the
number and variety of test we have run. We will be running
performance testing on all the new Towers, and should
be able to give you a good comparative picture in a
couple of weeks. The tests below were run on top of
OS 10.1. Early next week we will be posting extensive
performance numbers when running Mac OS 9.x, including
Photoshop and gaming results.
Difference and similarities in processor
and memory systems of each machine
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with TwinView and 64MB of SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
Drive
60 GB @ 7200 rpm
80 GB @ 7200 rpm
80 GB @ 7200 rpm
Operating System
10.1
10.1
10.1.2
Price
$2,499
$3,499
$2,999
"Real World" Tests
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 were timed with a stopwatch.
The times are then converted to percentages relative to the
Power Mac G4/867, which is set to 100%. For all scores, higher
numbers are better.
Drive Tests
Drive activity is not a processor intensive task. So here
it is the speed of the drive and its support system,that for
the most part determines performance. The first test above
copies a folder that has a little over 1,000 files in it.
We are guessing, but perhaps the better performance for the
dual processor machines it due to the fact that the drive
has two L2 & L3 caches
to play with (each processor has 2 MB of L3 cache and 256K
of L2). In the second test, which is working on a single file,
and presumably a continuous data stream, the caches perhaps
are not as relevant to performance.
This test creates and destroys 1,000 windows. During this
test only 60% of the Gigahertz machine's dual processors were
doing any any work.
Number Crunching & Rendering Tests
Again here only 50% of the Gigahertz machines processing
capability is being utilized. Given the clock speed difference,
this is about the performance difference you would expect
between these two machines
This is the only single application test we run that takes
up as much processing bandwidth as you throw at it.. 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.
Encoding/Decoding Tests
Unfortunately this function of QuickTime does
not take advantage of dual processors ... and it shows
However this function does! Converting QuickTime
movies to DV allows you to import them into iMovie
Again this is the kind of performance split
you would expect from the faster machine.. see StuffIt
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