The Quadra 650 uses a 33 MHz 68040 CPU, making it the second-fastest
Quadra ever. Drive is a 250 MB Apple-branded Quantum ProDrive LPS
formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
The drive was tested with Norton and optimized before
benchmarking.
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 3 November 1998 using System 7.5.5 with all
inessential extensions off. Computer attached to a 14" color monitor
and tested in 8-bit video mode (other modes caused Speedometer to
crash). 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.
cache CPU graphics disk math
32KB 21.63 24.15 4.86 137.5
64KB 21.90 24.30 4.89 137.6
128KB 21.90 24.45 4.91 137.4
256KB 21.90 23.72 5.62 137.4
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.
Speedometer 4.02
The system was tested on 3 November 1998 under System 7.5.5 with all
inessential extensions off. Computer attached to a 14" color monitor
and tested in 8-bit video mode. Results are relative to a Quadra 605,
which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.
These numbers compare performance at different cache settings.
cache CPU graphics disk math
32KB 1.19 n/a 1.89 19.98
64KB 1.19 1.34 1.89 20.01
128KB 1.19 n/a 1.91 20.01
256KB 1.19 1.32 2.16 20.02
The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests,
which these numbers bear out. As above, with this particular setup,
cache size makes no appreciable difference, except that the disk score
is a bit higher with a 256 KB cache.
Surprisingly, although Mac fans have long believed IDE hard drives
were inferior to SCSI drives, the Quadra 630
(the first desktop Mac with an IDE drive) offers virtually identical
performance under MacBench 4.
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 TM1280S is a competent performer and probably faster
than the original drive in the Quadra 650. 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 TM1280S 2,954K 3,932K
Quantum ST2.1S 3,145K 5,242K
ramBunctious 15,728K 15,728K
Tests with other Macs show the ST2.1S runs faster then 4 Mbps, so
the 3,145K write ceiling seems to be a limit on the Quadra 605's SCSI
throughput. The 5,242K read speed is the best we've seen on a Mac
without fast SCSI - the spec tops out at 5,120K.
Since we normally run Mac OS 8.1 on this Quadra, we also ran
TimeDrive under OS 8.1.
drive write read
Quantum TM1280S 3,145K 4,306K
Quantum ST2.1S 3,145K 4,493K
ramBunctious 15,728K 15,728K
Both read and write speeds were higher for the TM1280S. The 3,145K
seems to be a maximum write speed, since both drives reach it
consistently.
The ramBunctious benchmark demonstrates that a RAM Disk is five
times faster than the SCSI bus for writes and three times faster on
reads.
Go to the Quadra
650 profile.
