I wouldn’t recommend running Mac OS X 10.4 with less than 512 MB (although both the Lombard and the iBook only had 384 MB), but older RAM can quite often be very expensive, so is it financially viable? Would it change the order of the results? Would maxing these machines to their maximum help? Some of the test machines didn’t have a lot of RAM. They also are less upgradeable or at least harder to upgrade. Macs aimed at the consumer market and having a lower price tag do not perform as well as those aimed at business users costing a lot more. While it is hard to compare machines with different variables – some have faster processors, some have less RAM, and some have stock hard drives while some have new ones – we can see a pattern emerging. If he were to max his to 1 GB,I think we would easily see it running twice as fast. We also have to bear in mind I am running 1 GB of RAM and he only has 640 MB. While we didn’t see his Pismo G4 being twice as fast as my Pismo G3, the results were close to it.
It belongs to a friend of mine (thanks Michael) who has recently restored this beauty with my help, and he pointed out that the MachSpeed website states that G4 upgrade supposedly makes it twice as fast as a standard 400 MHz G3 Pismo.
The Pismo upgraded with a Daystar MachSpeed 550 MHz G4 processor amazed me. With this in mind, the Pismo G3 is already maxed to its 1 GB limit of RAM, while the Power Mac G4 has only 640 MB of RAM, way under its 2 GB limit for OS X (1.5 GB if you are running OS 9). the Pismo due to the G4 in the Power Mac. I would have expected to see a bigger difference in the Power Mac vs.
However, viewing the benchmark results, the Power Mac barely creeps ahead. Compared to the Pismo G3, it certainly feels a lot snappier, and the Finder is more responsive. I recently lost my Intel iMac (it died a few weeks ago), so I have been using the Power Mac G4 as my main desktop machine. It has a 20% lower CPU speed, but the added RAM and, to some degree, the faster hard drive seem to aid the PowerBook very much. My Pismo is only a 400 MHz model (these also came in 500 MHz), yet it outstripped the 500 MHz iMac and iBook by quite a lot.
The Pismo is often regarded as the daddy of G3 PowerBooks, being the last in the range and having official support for Mac OS X 10.4. The Lombard PowerBook G3 (which has 512 KB of L2 cache, as does the iMac) isn’t too far behind the iBook G3, yet it has the same amount of RAM and only two-thirds of the iBook’s CPU speed.Įven more of an oddity is the iMac vs. These were aimed at consumers rather than the business market, and it shows in the results. The biggest shocks where the poor results of the iBook G3 (with the lowest L2 cache) and iMac G3. All machines have a 100 MHz system bus and PC100 RAM fitted, putting them on an even more even footing for comparing.
All are running Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, the last version of OS X for G3 Macs.ĥ12 MB 133 MHz L2 cache, 384 MB of RAM, stock 6 GB hard driveĢ56 KB 500 MHz L2 cache, 384 MB of RAM, stock 10 GB hard driveĥ12 KB 500 MHz L2 cache, 640 MB of RAM, stock 20 GB hard driveġ MB 200 MHz L2 cache, 1 GB of RAM, new 5400 rpm 40 GB hard driveġ MB 200 MHz L2 cache, 640 MB of RAM, 20 GB 7200 rpm hard driveġ MB 250 MHz L2 cache, 640 MB of RAM, 80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive
On all the machines and all the tests, each machine had nothing running except the benchmarking software and we started from cold. To compare the machines, I used Xbench and Geekbench. I thought I would share my findings with you. I have a lot of Macs similarly spec’d, and I began noticing a lot of difference between them, so I set about benchmarking them and comparing the results.