Power Mac G4/1 GHz Dual

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This "Mirror Drive Door" Power Mac G4 has been my workhorse for a couple years now, and it's currently outfitted with its original Radeon 9000 video card, dual 1 GHz PowerPC 7455 CPUs, a pair of 400 GB Deskstar hard drives (one for work, one for backup), and 2 GB of RAM.

The Mirror Drive Door was the last Power Mac to boot into the Classic Mac OS, and it requires Mac OS 9.2 or later (10.2 or later when running OS X). Benchmarks were run from an external FireWire drive (7200 rpm, probably a Deskstar as well), since I didn't want to mess with my normal setup on the internal hard drive.

Let 1000 Windows Bloom

The system was tested on 29 January 2008. Running Panther (OS X 10.3.9), the Power Mac displayed 1000 windows in 28.5 seconds. The same test took only 13.4 sec. in Tiger (10.4.11). Apple has definitely been improving graphics performance as Mac OS X has moved forward.

At this point we don't have a bootable version of Mac OS 9.2.2 that works on either of our G4 Power Macs; we'll continue to work toward that goal and update this page when we can test under the Classic Mac OS.

Power Fractal

This program creates a fractal pattern, which can really tax a CPU. Under Panther, it took 2.9 seconds and scored 8,710 Mflops. Under Tiger, it ran in 3.0 seconds at 8,565 Mflops.

Xbench

Xbench 1.3 runs on both versions of OS X we're using for our testing. A score of 100 is the performance of a 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5:

          10.3.9 10.4.11
Overall    42.4   50.4  
CPU        66.0   54.3  
Threads    61.7   71.3  
Memory     38.7   38.1  
Quartz     58.0   55.2  
OpenGL     55.6   60.7  
User Int.  26.3   57.9  
Drive      31.9   35.3

We can see how OS X has become more efficient over the years. Even though the CPU scores lower in Tiger, the increased performance in the Threads, OpenGL, Drive, and especially User Interface tests more than offsets it.

Geekbench

Geekbench only runs in Tiger and Leopard (which I don't yet have). Scores under OS X 10.4.11 are 1147 for the Integer test, 903 for floating point, 493 for Memory, 348 for Streams, and 850 overall.

Conclusion

As we've noted elsewhere, OS X keeps getting better, even on old hardware like the August 2002 Power Mac. This machine will continue as our primary production machine for the forseeable future, as we are hopelessly wed to Claris Home Page and thus need a Mac that can run Classic Mac OS apps.

Go to the Mystic Power Mac G4 profile.

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