BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS

 

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Power Mac 1.42GHz "Dualie" versus others

Originally posted 03/18/03 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

Does the 1.42GHz Power Mac overcome the memory bottleneck experienced with earlier DDR Power Macs? Or is it just another speed bump? Let's see what the test results show...

 

 

 

 

 

 

(SEE PAGE 2 FOR Quake3 Arena RESULTS)

 

CONCLUSION

I ordered the 1.42GHz MP for my personal use, not because I believed it was the breakthough Power Mac, but because I wanted FireWire 800, AirPort Extreme, and the Radeon 9700 option. If you are looking for the next big jump in CPU speed, you're going to have to keep waiting.

Compared to the old SDR Power Mac, there is still no advantage to having a DDR memory Power Mac outside of faster clock speed, with one exception: doing large gigabit network transfers while running CPU intensive apps. And how many of us do that regularly? Anyone?

As you can see from page two, unless you tweak the config file, the fastest Mac gets smoked by a comparably equipped Pentium 4 when running Quake3. Unless Apple makes a dramatic leap in technology, there's very little chance they'll produce a Wintel "killer."

 

RELATED LINKS

PowerLogix published an in-depth white paper discussion (PDF ) comparing single data rate static RAM ("SDR") architecture versus double data rate ("DDR") when designing the level 3 cache circuitry for use with the latest Motorola G4/745x processors.

Here are test results comparing the 3GHz Pentium 4 to a Dual 1.25GHz G4. I'm not clear on how the tests were chosen but I hope to test the 3GHz P4 using my own "MP" Photoshop script that favors dual processors.

The battle lines are forming between the hot Radeon 9700 Pro and the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Here is the Windows PC test results on AnandTech showing the Radeon superior when you crank up the resolution and anti-alias settings. (You might also want to take a look at how the Radeon 9700 Pro compares to the GeForce4 Titanium 4600 since Apple will be offering both on the new Power Macs.) Stay tuned for Bare Feat's own comparison of the Radeon 9700 to the GeForce4 Ti.

 

TEST NOTES

The "SDR" Power Mac 1GHz MP had 1GB of PC133 CL2 SDRAM.
The "DDR" Power Mac 1GHz MP had 1.25GB of PC2700 CL2.5 DDR RAM
The "DDR" Power Mac 1.25GHz MP had 1.5GB of PC2700 CL2.5 DDR RAM
The "DDR" Power Mac 1.42GHz MP had 1.5GB of PC2700 CL2.5 DDR RAM

All four were running the GeForce4 Titanium graphics card.

For details on each real world test, read "HOW I TEST."

 

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© 2003 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
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