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.
