© 1999 Lawrence I. Charters (writing as Washington Apple Pi Labs)
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 21, no. 6, November-December 1999, pp. 71-72.
Benchmarks
When we ran benchmarks of the original iMac (Washington Apple Pi Journal, January/February 1999), we decided not to use the Ziff-Davis MacBench 5.0 suite. For one thing, we prefer our own Washington Apple Pi Mac Bench (see “Introducing: Washington Apple Pi Mac Bench,” Washington Apple Pi Journal, January/February 1998). But the biggest problem with MacBench is that it doesn’t make comparisons that make sense for existing users.
MacBench 5.0 is standardized on a Power Macintosh G3/300, which is given a rating of 100. Computers prior to the G3/300 are ignored, so if you have a Mac Plus, or Quadra 800, or Power Mac 6100/60, you have no way of drawing meaningful comparisons between your computer and whatever is currently being measured.
So, once again, we decided to use Symantec’s System Info 4.0, part of Norton Utilities for Macintosh 4.0. System Info 4.0 includes a large database of older machines, making it easy to compare new technology with old. It does have a few quirks: it suggests the disk cache should be set to 128K, that AppleTalk should be off, and that the video should be set to 256 colors. Such settings make no sense with modern Macs, but we went along with this, and have dubbed these “Norton settings.” We then created other sets of settings with what we consider more reasonable values for the world of 1999, and ran several tests. Results marked with an asterisk (*) are supplied with Norton Utilities 4.0:
System Rating
(an overall rating of performance):
Score — Computer
0.961 — Mac Plus *
11.7 — PowerBook 170 *
91.2 — PowerBook 1400cs/117 *
581 — iMac (original 233 MHz)
642 — iBook (fresh out of box)
687 — iBook (typical use)
731 — iBook (Norton settings)
The “fresh out of box” settings had the iBook set with a disk cache of 1024K, the screen set to thousands of colors, AppleTalk turned on, and Virtual Memory set at 64 megabytes. “Typical use” left the screen, AppleTalk and disk cache settings alone, but turned off Virtual Memory.
We decided to take a look at Norton’s CPU and disk ratings separately:
CPU Rating
(processor and system bus performance):
Score — Computer
1.18 — Mac Plus *
10.3 — PowerBook 170 *
127 — PowerBook 1400cs/117 *
632 — iMac (original 233 MHz)
741 — iBook (fresh out of box)
811 — iBook (Norton settings)
815 — iBook (typical use)
Disk Rating
(disk drive plus disk caching performance):
Score — Computer
26.3 — Mac Plus *
92.4 — PowerBook 170 *
111 — PowerBook 1400cs/117 *
477 — iBook (Norton settings)
484 — iMac (original 233 MHz)
645 — iBook (fresh out of box)
675 — iBook (typical use)
On the whole, these figures show the iBook, no matter how you configure it, is a very fast machine. They also show that turning off virtual memory, adding more RAM, and adjusting the disk cache make it even faster.