It's been quite a while since we've published any new benchmark
tests on Low End Mac. I've been working for the past 4-5 weeks to
revive a couple of old Power Macs that never ran quite right - a
Blue & White G3 and
a "Mystic" Power Mac
G4/450 with dual processors. Long story short, the problems turned
out to be bad RAM.
The Mystic was Apple's second generation of AGP Power Mac, and its
claims to fame include gigabit ethernet and dual processors. It's a lot
like the "Sawtooth" G4 - same Rage 128 Pro AGP 2x video card, same four
memory sockets, same drive support, same case. But with Motorola unable
to provide CPUs beyond 500 MHz, adding a second CPU was the only way
Apple could offer more power.
This computer has 768 MB of RAM (three 256 MB PC133-333 modules) and
two hard drives, an 80 GB 7200 rpm Deskstar, which is one of my
favorite drives, and a 60 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. Each drive is
partitioned and has Mac OS X 10.2.8, 10.3.9, and 10.4.11 installed. I
have an Apple mouse and keyboard attached and used a 17" Samsung 700DF
monitor at 1024 x 768 resolution and millions of colors for all tests.
Let 1000 Windows Bloom
The system was tested on 25 January 2008. Running Jaguar (OS X
10.2.8), the Mystic displayed 1000 windows in 56.4 seconds. The same
test took only 41.1 seconds under Panther (10.3.9), and just 32.2 sec.
in Tiger (10.4.11). Apple has definitely been improving graphics
performance as Mac OS X has moved forward.
At this point we're not able to boot into Mac OS 9.2.2, but 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 bog down a
CPU. It does not run under Jaguar. Under Panther, it took 7.0 seconds
and scored 3,662 Mflops. Under Tiger, that dropped to 7.9 seconds and
3,232 Mflops.
Xbench
Xbench has been out for some time, and version 1.1.3 runs on all three
versions of OS X installed on the Mystic, and tests a lot of things. Here
are the test results using Xbench 1.1.3 for OS X 10.2.8 (100 = 1 GHz G4)
and 1.3 for 10.3 and 10.4 (100 = 2.0 GHz G5):
10.2.8 10.3.9 10.4.11
Overall 69.6 22.8 25.7
CPU 54.4 29.5 28.9
Threads 68.4 34.9 39.4
Memory 73.8 20.7 23.2
Quartz 72.7 27.2 25.1
OpenGL 62.3 34.0 38.6
User Int. 68.9 9.1 12.0
Drive 103.4 51.2 49.4
Again we can see how OS X has become more efficient over the years.
The overall score is about 15% higher under Tiger than Jaguar (comparing
Xbench 1.1.3 scores, which are no longer included here), and
improvements are especially evident in the User Interface and Threads
benchmarks.
Geekbench
Geekbench only runs in Tiger and Leopard (which I don't yet have).
Scores under OS X 10.4.11 are 529 for the Integer test, 529 for
floating point, 266 for Memory, 165 for Streams, and 439 overall.
Conclusion
The best news is that OS X keeps getting better, even on old
hardware like the January 2001 Mystic. This machine will be our primary
testbed for hard drives, memory configurations, CPU upgrades, and AGP
video cards, so we'll be comparing a lot of things to the numbers
reported here.
