It was only last year that I got my first Power Mac G5. I have quite a collection of G4 Power Macs, several no longer working, and the G5 gave me several improvements, including a higher CPU speed, faster memory, built-in USB 2.0, FireWire 800, and a SATA hard drive bus.
Category Archives: Benchmarks
I’ve had this Blue and White Power Mac G3 in my office on and off for a few months. I spent several weeks working on it and a Mystic Power Mac G4/450 trying to get them both working reliably. Long story short, the problems turned out to be bad RAM.
For months now, the Beige Power Mac G3 has been the most popular profile on Low End Mac, indicating to us that it’s the hottest low-end Mac out there. We recently rated it a Low End Mac Best Buy – but with reservations if you plan to run Mac OS X.
2001: 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 Mac Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The installed hard drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with LaCie Silverlining software. This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.
The Mac SE/30 uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU, just like the Mac IIx and IIcx. The hard drive in this SE/30 is an Apple-branded Quantum LP80S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
The Mac Plus came with an 8 MHz 68000 CPU; the Brainstorm upgrade replaces that with a low power 16 MHz 68000. Brainstorm had the guts to claim it could more than double performance. Some claims just beg to be tested.
The Mac Classic II uses the same 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU as the SE/30, the model it replaced. The computer was tested with the same external drive used for Speedometer 3 on the SE/30; the internal hard drive was also benchmarked.
The Mac Plus uses the same 8 MHz 68000 CPU found in the original Macintosh and the 512K Fat Mac. The attached hard drive is a 160 MB Quantum, and the computer has 4 MB of memory. Because it is an older design, the Plus is generally considered to be about 15% slower than the 8 […]
The Umax SuperMac C500 and C600 were the first “Power Macs” to have their CPU in a ZIF socket, making upgrades very easy. Having a C500/200 at work and finding an incredible garage sale special on upgrades from Small Dog Electronics, I decided to test the 240 MHz upgrade and the CacheDoubler.
The Mac II uses a 16 MHz 68020 CPU. The hard drive is an ancient 5.25″ 80 MB Apple-branded Quantum drive – the one that originally shipped with this machine in 1987 – formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
The Power Macintosh 6100 (a.k.a. the Perform 6110 series) shipped in two speeds: a 60 MHz version introduced on March 14, 1994 as one of the first Power Macs, and a 66 MHz version introduced on January 5, 1995. Until I benchmarked a 6100/60, 6100/66, and 6100/66 with 256 KB level 2 (L2) cache, I assumed the […]
The Color Classic (also sold as the Performa 250) uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, but the Sonnet Presto accelerator provides either a 25 MHz 68040 or a 68LC040 (a 68040 without a math section), which are much more powerful. But how much more powerful is it?
The Color Classic uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, so performance should be comparable to a 16 MHz Mac IIcx or Mac LC. The tested unit also has a 16 MHz 68882 math coprocessor. The hard drive is an 80 MB Apple branded drive formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.
The Umax SuperMac J700 was the first Power Mac clone that I benchmarked. My J700 shipped with a 180 MHz 604e CPU, and has 104 MB of memory and a Quantum Fireball 2110 hard drive installed. It shipped standard with an ixMicro Twin Turbo 128 video card, which I replaced with an ixMicro Ultimate Rez 3D […]
The Mac Portable uses a 16 MHz 68000 CPU, so performance is about twice that of the 8 MHz Mac SE and Classic. The Portable and PowerBook 100 were the only Macs to use a 16 MHz 68000. The installed hard drive is a 40 MB Apple-branded Conner CP-3045 formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.0.1 […]
The Mac SE uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The tested hard drive is a 40 MB Apple-branded Quantum LP40S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup. This was not the original hard drive, which had been a much slower 20 MB mechanism.
