Low End Mac Benchmarks

Mac Color Classic

Dan Knight - 1999.02.26 - Tip Jar

The Color Classic uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, so performance should be comparable to a Mac IIcx or LC. The tested unit also had a 16 MHz 68882 math coprocessor. Drive is an 80 MB Apple drive formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.

The drive was tested with Norton and optimized with Speed Disk before benchmarking.

Remember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

This system was also tested with a Sonnet Presto 25 MHz 68LC040 accelerator.

Speedometer 3.06

The system would not run Speedometer 3.06.

Speedometer 4.02

The system was tested on 26 February 1999 under System 7.5.5 using the internal monitor in "thousands of colors" mode. Results are relative to a Quadra 605, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

The first set of numbers compares performance at different cache settings.

cache  video   CPU  graphics  disk   math
 32KB  16-bit   0.25   0.23    0.86   1.94
 64KB  16-bit   0.25   0.23    0.89   1.94
128KB  16-bit   0.25   0.23    0.90   1.92
256KB  16-bit   0.25   0.22    0.75   1.93

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. With this particular setup, a cache size of 256 KB has an unexpectedly negative impact, which I verified by running the test a second time.

Speedometer 4 was not tested at different video settings.

Go to the Color Classic profile.

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