The Quadra 950 is a hulking monster of a Mac, obviously designed as
a server. It has a 33 MHz 68040 CPU, making it the second-fastest
Quadra ever. Mine came used with 208 MB of memory and two internal
Quantum Fireball 1080S drives, one formatted with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit
and the other with Apple Drive Setup 8.0.9. The system was also tested
with our benchmark drive, an external Quantum ST2.1S formatted under
System 7.5.5
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 23 November 2000 using System 7.5.5 with
extensions off. Computer attached to a 19" color monitor and tested in
8-bit video mode at 832 x 624 resolution. The disk cache was set to
128K. 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.
OS/drive CPU graphics disk math
7.5.5/ST2.1S 21.90 22.78 7.29 137.7
7.5.5/FWB 21.90 23.44 6.29 137.7
7.5.5/Mac 21.90 23.44 6.17 137.4
7.5.5/ramB 22.18 22.27 45.97 137.7
The CPU and math scores match the Quadra
650, which also sports a 33 MHz 68040 processor. Graphics are about
4% slower, not something the user is likely to notice, and may be due
to the higher screen resolution. Disk performance is very impressive,
although direct comparison with the Q650 is not possible since it was
tested with a different hard drive.
Speedometer 4.02
The system was tested on 23 November 2000 under System 7.5.5 with
extensions off. Computer attached to a 19" color monitor and tested in
8-bit video mode at 832 x 624 resolution. The disk cache was set to
128K. Results are relative to a Quadra 605, which rates 1.0. Numbers
rounded off to two decimal places.
These numbers compare performance of different drives and operating
systems.
OS/drive CPU graphics disk math
7.5.5/ST2.1S 1.19 1.29 2.83 20.02
7.5.5/FWB 1.19 1.30 2.46 20.02
7.5.5/Mac 1.19 1.31 2.42 20.02
7.5.5/ramB 1.19 1.30 4.29 20.03
8.0/ST2.1S 1.19 1.29 2.85 20.03
8.0/FWB 1.19 1.30 2.45 20.03
8.0/Mac 1.19 1.31 2.41 20.03
8.0/ramB 1.19 1.31 4.14 20.03
The CPU and math scores are virtually identical to the Quadra 650, which uses the same processor. The
graphics score is a few percentage points slower than the Q650, which
is probably due to the 832 x 624 screen resolution. These hard drives
handily outperform the 250 MB Quantum drive tested in the Quadra
650.
PowerPC Upgrade
On March 14, 2001, we installed Apple's Power Mac Upgrade
Card in the 950, which had since been upgraded to Mac OS 8.1. This
card runs a PowerPC 601 at twice CPU speed - 66 MHz, just like a Power
Mac 6100. The card has a 1 MB level 2 cache.
cache CPU graphics disk math
128KB 3.48 1.63 2.42 115.2
256KB 3.48 1.65 2.43 116.0
Speedometer 4 can run in either PowerPC or 68k mode; however, we
only tested it in PowerPC mode. If you're not running PowerPC programs,
there's really no point to the upgrade, which is especially impressive
on the CPU and math scores, offering 2.9 and 5.8 times the performance
of the 68040 processor. Even graphics performance is improved by about
25%.
CPU, graphics, and math scores are virtually identical to those of
the Power Mac 6100/66. Disk scores are higher,
but that's probably due to the newer, faster hard drive in the
Quadra.
MacBench 3
The system was tested on 23 November 2000 under System 7.5.5 with
extensions off. Computer attached to a 19" color monitor and tested in
8-bit video mode at 832 x 624 resolution. The disk cache was set at
128K for all tests. The variable is the hard drive: our external
Quantum ST2.1S and a pair of internal Fireball 1080S drive (one
formatted with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit, the other with Msc OS 8.0).
MacBench 3 will not test RAM drives. Results are relative to a Power
Mac 6100/60, which rates 10. Numbers rounded off to two decimal
places.
drive CPU math disk graphics
ST2.1S 4.84 1.03 14.04 11.16
1080S/FWB 4.84 1.03 12.65 11.16
1080S/Mac 4.84 1.03 12.31 11.16
The CPU score is almost exactly twice that of the Mac IIfx, while math performance is nearly triple the
IIfx. Graphics are over 2.5x faster, but the disk benchmark is slightly
slower.
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 Fireball 1080S is a very impressive performer and
probably faster than the original drive in the Quadra 950. 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 1080S/FWB 7,340K 3,786K
Quantum 1080S/Mac 6,291K 3,641K
Quantum ST2.1S 4,493K 4,493K
ramBunctious 15,728K 15,728K
The Fireball 1080S formatted with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit yielded the
best write speeds we've seen yet, far in excess of the 5,120K (5 MBps)
ceiling for regular SCSI-2 or Apple's claim that Quadras can sometimes
hit 6,144K (6 MBps).
Although write speeds were very impressive, read speeds trailed
those of the Quadra 650: the ST2.1S performed only 85% as well here as
on the Q650.
The ramBunctious test is consistent with both the Quadra 605 and
650, giving a write score twice that of the fastest hard drive.
We also ran TimeDrive under Mac OS 8.0, which yielded some
impressive results.
drive write read
Quantum 1080S/FWB 15,728K 4,493K
Quantum 1080S/Mac 8,738K 3,641K
Quantum ST2.1S 4,493K 4,493K
ramBunctious 15,728K 15,728K
We ran the write test three times to verify that the Quantum
Fireball 1080S formatted with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0.6 matched RAM
disk performance with ramBunctious. That's absolutely stunning
performance, although read performance lagged considerably. (We've
concluded that 4,493 KBps is the maximum read performance for the Q650
and Q950.)
The Quantum 1080S formatted under Mac OS 8.0 also performed very
well. It wasn't nearly as fast as the FWB-formatted one, but it was far
faster than our benchmark Quantum ST2.1S drive.
We're very impressed with performance of the two Fireball 1080S
drives under Mac OS 8.0.
Go to the Quadra
950 profile.
