Experience local shipping options and optimized product inventory for your region.
This is part 1 of what is expected to be at least a 3 part series. I will go through the impacts various hard drive, processor, and video upgrades offer in terms of performance gained. Tests will be performed under OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.1.4. The benchmarking tests will be performed on a PowerBook G3 Lombard, PowerMac 7300/200MHz, PowerMac G3 Beige, PowerMac G3 Blue & White. For reference, testing will also be done on a current iMac G4, PowerBook G4, and PowerMac G4 model. For our first round, the PowerMac G3 Beige has been selected. Thus far we have tested standard boot time, time to launch Internet Explorer 5, time to launch Adobe PhotoShop 7, and time to create a 4 minute and 14 second 160mbit MP3 using iTunes 2. Sorry for the long introduction. Anyway, to get started I want to talk about the cost of a new computer. The cheapest iMac G4 Model is $1399. The cheapest PowerBook G4/550MHz model is $2299, the cheapest PowerMac G4 model starts at $1599. Now mind you, those are the least expensive starter models. You may still have to upgrade and add on to those models to have the system gains you're looking for over the model you have now. Depending on what your needs are, it also may be the right way to go... But not before at least considering the upgrade possibilities of your existing machine. What's the current model today, will be a lot cheaper and replaced with something faster 6 months from now. If you can spend under $500 today to get what you need out of your current system today, there is no doubt that you will be able to buy the same system from today or even a better model/config for at least $500 less than the cost of it today. You come out even or ahead even if do buy that new system down the road and in the mean time you don' have to start fresh configuring the new machine from scratch too. No matter how fast your current computer is, if you have it starved for memory, it's a lot slower than it can be. OS 9 can easily use 50-90 Megabytes of your installed Memory, for OS X, 96MBs is only a start. The memory left after the Apple OS loads is what you have to run your applications. It is when you don't have enough real memory and either virtual memory or disk swapping is used that things run much slower than they could. Memory is extremely cheap and you'd still need it for your new machine too.... 256MBs can be added for less than $50, 512MBs for less than $120. It makes no sense to skimp on memory and even sillier to buy a new Mac if the Mac you have is memory short, but has room for more. From our own testing, once you are sure to have enough memory, the processor is the next thing to upgrade. In nearly all cases, even start up times for booting the Apple OS were moderately reduced with the fastest startup time at 1 minute, 35 seconds compared to the stock system taking 2:31 from cold to finder. Our most processor intensive test so far involved doing a MP3 160Mbit RIP of a 4 minute and 14 second song. With just the G4/400MHz processor, the time was only 56.2 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 6 seconds with the stock 233MHz processor! In part 2, we will be adding 2-3 additional processor intensive tests for more comparison. Conclusion thus far? For well under $200 it is easy to more than double the processing power and performance of your existing Beige G3. We expect similar results comparing a 7300 PowerMac with 233MHz G3 upgrade compared to faster G3 and G4 upgrade cards.
Next to look at is your hard drive. There comes a point where the hard drive is the bottleneck, never mind that you probably could use some extra storage capacity too! For our test purposes, we used a 40GB Maxtor 6L040J2 7200RPM hard drive and performed the same tests we did on the stock drive on this drive connected first to an UltraTek ATA/66 card and then to a SIIG ATA/133 Card. As we had hoped, this shaved significantly off the time to boot and Applications loaded nearly twice as fast or nearly twice as fast regardless of processor almost every time! We have not done data transfer tests yet to show the gains in raw storage transfer rates, but real world tests with the processor intensive iTunes test showed only a small improvement made with the faster the drive setup. Regardless, with application that require more data transfer as well as benefiting from faster processor (Photoshop being one of them), the extra Hard Disk performance added to the processor gains makes for a very snappy enhancement. Also, the faster the processor/cache, the faster the gains in HD performance. Conclusion from this? If you need more hard drive space, you can get a good jump in system performance too. The cost of adding the 40GB Maxtor and the VST controller is under $140! For under $170 you can add 60GBs, for under $270 you can add 120GBs! Something else to note is that there did not seem to be much benefit to having the ATA/133 in the PowerMac G3 Beige. The difference between the ATA/66 and ATA/133 cards not much where there was a difference and the ATA/66 VST card even beat the SIIG ATA/133 in one of the tests. It will be interesting to see what our next tests show for these cards, but regardless of that outcome the VST ATA/66 is of superb value even in a world of ATA/100 and ATA/133 Mac Interface cards.
It is a lot to digest and this is only the beginning. One further note.... We were rather surprised that the PowerLogix G4/533MHz didn't return better scores. It was bested by our G4/500MHz Processor in all but one test. It seem that with the G4 processor, the speed the backside cache operates makes a more significant impact than what we have seen in past testing of G3 with backside cache speed. The G4/533MHz comes with 250MHz rated cache, but due to available cache to processor speed ratios, 213MHz is the fastest cache speed available at 533MHz, short of overclocking the cache to 267MHz. You can also operate the PowerLogix ZIF at a speed of 500MHz and have a 250MHz backside cache speed. We did several tests to confirm that the PowerLogix had identical performance results when set to operate at 500MHz with the 250MHz cache speed setting. In the Blue&White G3 PowerMac, this PowerLogix upgrade operates at 550MHz with a 226MHz backside cache.... We do expect the this to provide the best performance for the tests we do in the B&W G3 model. If you have any questions, feel free to respond to this e-mail. Please put 'upgrading' as the subject for the e-mail you send. For part 2 we will expand the number of tests on the Beige G3 as well as do all of the same tests on a PowerMac 7300. Our freely provided XpostFacto OS X installation utility will be used to install OS X on the 7300. Should be very interesting. :-) |