Mac II Benchmarked

The Mac II uses a 16 MHz 68020 CPU. The hard drive is an ancient 5.25″ 80 MB Apple-branded Quantum drive – the one that originally shipped with this machine in 1987 – formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.

Mac II with color displayRemember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

Speedometer 3.06

The system was tested on 1998.10.25 using System 7.1 with all inessential extensions off. The computer was attached to a 17″ Megagraphics monitor with a 1-bit video card. Results are relative to a Mac SE or Classic, which score 1.0. Numbers have been rounded off to two decimal places.

These numbers compares performance at different hard drive cache settings.

cache  video   CPU  graphics  disk   math
 32KB  1-bit   3.42   4.40    1.35   5.79
 64KB  1-bit   3.43   4.40    1.35   5.79
128KB  1-bit   3.46   4.41    1.35   5.76
256KB  1-bit   3.44   4.41    1.33   5.79
512KB  1-bit   3.43   4.40    1.34   5.78
  1MB  1-bit   3.44   4.40    0.49   5.78

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. With this particular setup, cache size makes no appreciable difference except at 1 MB, at which point it is significantly slower than with a smaller cache. This demonstrates that the System 7.1 cache was not very good.

The older hard drive is probably the main reason drive performance lags so far behind the Mac IIcx.

Speedometer 4.02

The system was tested on 1998.10.28 under System 7.1 with all inessential extensions off. The computer was attached to a 17″ Megagraphics monitor with a 1-bit video card. Results are relative to a Quadra 605, which scores 1.0. Numbers have been rounded off to two decimal places.

These numbers compares performance at different hard drive cache settings.

cache  video   CPU  graphics  disk   math
 32KB  1-bit   0.22   0.19    0.53   0.82
 64KB  1-bit   0.22   0.19    0.53   0.82
128KB  1-bit   0.22   0.19    0.53   0.82
256KB  1-bit   0.22   0.19    0.53   0.82

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. As above, cache size makes no appreciable difference, at least up to 256 KB. This demonstrates that the System 7.1 cache was not very helpful.

Keywords: #macii

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