From MacUser, May 1994

(c) 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., a division of Ziff Communications Co. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.


The Power of Power Macintosh

Not just another Mac. Speed is one of the main differences between Power Macs and 680x0 Macs. Our MacBench 1.1 suite of subsystem-level benchmark tests showed that Power Macs have the raw processing potential, especially for floating-point operations, to outperform Quadras several times over. We also performed more than a dozen common real-life tasks, using prerelease versions of native applications on the Power Macs and shipping applications on the 680x0 Macs. Even though we used early prerelease software, the Power Macs showed their muscle. You can expect native applications running on these machines to be significantly faster by the time the applications ship. In our application-based tests, all scores are referenced to those of an LC III with an optional FPU, which are assigned a score of 10.

Processor
The Processor test measures raw processing power and is a good indicator of overall speed.
Floating Point
The speed of floating-point operations is important for such tasks as scientific calculation and 3-D rendering.
Video Mix
This test indicates how quickly a Mac will respond on such tasks as screen redraw and scrolling a graphic.
Disk Mix
This test gauges the speed of disk-intensive operations, such as opening a large file or searching a database.
Business Tasks
We performed a variety of productivity tasks, using applications such as WordPerfect and ClarisWorks.
Publishing Tasks
To perform a variety of publishing tasks, we used FreeHand, PageMaker, and Photoshop.
Rendering Tasks
We used Infini-D, Painter, and VideoFusion for performing our suite of rendering tasks.

	Processor	Floating Point	Video Mix	Disk Mix	Business Tasks	Publishing Tasks	Rendering Tasks
Macintosh LC III	9.95	137.74	9.94	10.21	10.00	10.00	10.00
Macintosh Quadra 610	31.59	311.44	18.76	15.78	20.44	26.57	29.40
Macintosh Quadra 650	41.95	412.73	24.82	19.93	25.44	34.00	38.27
Macintosh Quadra 840AV	49.47	477.79	24.52	21.65	28.54	59.00	91.13
Power Macintosh 6100	119.33	3222.38	25.08	16.22	26.32	50.00	95.27
Power Macintosh 6100 (w/optional L2 cache)	178.03	3433.12	29.63	16.84	34.51	61.00	112.55
Power Macintosh 7100 	167.11	4177.96	33.26	18.67	33.98	61.00	114.64
Power Macintosh 7100 (w/ optional L2 cache)	204.01	4327.54	34.55	20.21	41.82	67.00	125.68
Power Macintosh 8100 (L2 cache standard)	242.40	4525.06	36.12	22.28	46.49	79.00	146.74

