Low End Mac Reader Specials

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Low End Mac Benchmarks

Quadra 605

a.k.a. LC 475, Performa 475 or 476

Dan Knight - 2000.11.19 - Tip Jar

Speedometer 4 compares everything to a Quadra 605, which has an arbitrary score of 1.0 on each benchmark. But does it really score 1.0?

The Quadra 605 uses a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. Drive is a an Apple-branded Quantum ProDrive LPS240S formatted under Mac OS 8.1.

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 not tested with Speedometer 3.06.

Speedometer 4.02

The system was tested on 19 November 2000 under System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1 with extensions off. The disk cache was set at 128K. Computer run at 640 x 480 and tested in 1- and 8-bit video mode, but only 8-bit results are reported (there was no significant difference between 1-bit video and 8-bit video). Theoretically a Quadra 605 will score 1.0 on all tests. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

These numbers compare performance at different cache settings.

OS     CPU  graphics  disk    math
7.5.5  0.88   1.00    1.48    4.69
8.1    0.88   1.01    1.48    4.69

These tests indicate the CPU is roughly 12% slower than we would expect based on the 1.0 norm for Speedometer 4. It also shows that my Q605 has a faster hard drive than the one used to determining the normal 1.0 score. The other curiosity is a score of 4.69 for math - well over 4x higher than it should be.

A common upgrade for the Quadra 605 is replacing the low power 68LC040 processor, which lack a floating point unit (FPU), with a full-fledged 68040, which has the FPU. This should make a significant difference on the math benchmark:

chip   CPU  graphics  disk    math
LC040  0.88   1.00    1.48    4.69
68040  0.88   1.01    1.48   14.82

The full '040 makes no significant difference on any of these tests except for the math one, where it scores over three times higher.

Hard Drive and Memory Speed

The newest addition to our benchmark suite is TimeDrive 1.3 (available here), which measures drive throughput. This can test a floppy, Zip, hard drive, or RAM Disk. TimeDrive is fairly primitive; the benefit of that is being able to run it on very old Macs.

The Quantum LPS240S is a pedestrian performer, although it is apparently almost 50% faster than the baseline Q605 drive. We also tested our default external drive, a Quantum Fireball ST2.1S. Finally, to measure how fast the computer accesses memory, we also tested ramBunctious, a great little shareware RAM Disk program. (Numbers are KB/sec.)

drive              write     read 
Quantum LPS240S    2,246K   2,246K
Quantum ST2.1S     3,932K   3,932K
ramBunctious      15,728K  15,728K

Tests with other Macs show the ST2.1S runs faster then 4 Mbps, so the 3,932K ceiling seems to be a limit on the Quadra 605's SCSI throughput.

The ramBunctious benchmark demonstrates that a RAM Disk is about four times faster than the 605's SCSI bus.

Go to the Quadra 605 profile.

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