Low End Mac Benchmarks

Mac Portable

Dan Knight - 1998.10.06 - Tip Jar

The Portable uses a 16 MHz 68000 CPU, so performance is about twice that of the SE or Classic. Drive is a 40 MB Apple-branded Conner CP-3045 formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.0.1 (with any later version, it won't wake from Sleep mode).

Remember 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 6 October 1998 under System 6.0.8, 7.0.1, 7.1, and 7.5.5 with inessential extensions off. Results are relative to a Mac SE or Classic, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

The first set of numbers compares performance at different cache settings under System 7.1.

cache  CPU  graphics  disk   math
 32KB  2.15   1.82    1.25   1.95
 64KB  2.15   1.82    1.23   1.95
128KB  2.15   1.82    1.24   1.95
256KB  2.15   1.82    1.24   1.94

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.

The second set of numbers compares performance with different versions of the Macintosh operating system. Cache is set at 256 KB for all tests.

Mac OS  CPU  graphics  disk   math
 6.0.8  2.16   1.84    1.22   1.96
 7.0.1  2.16   1.83    1.23   1.95
 7.1    2.15   1.82    1.24   1.94
 7.5.5  2.15   1.82    1.13   1.94

Except for disk performance under System 7.5.5, results are virtually identical between version of the Mac OS. Testing with a 64KB cache returned disk results of 1.22 to 1.23 for each version of the OS.

Speedometer 4.02

Speedometer 4 doesn't run on 68000-based Macs.

Go to Mac Portable profile.

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