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.


Power Mac with SoftWindows / real PC speed

How well a Power Mac with SoftWindows performs varies with the Windows application you use and the Power Mac model, but it's generally similar to the performance of a low-end 486 PC. Graphic manipulations seem to be among the slower operations when Windows is running in emulation, as you can see in the results of our tests of both FreeHand for Windows, in which we zoomed out from a complex four-color graphic, and Excel for Windows, in which we ran a macro that made calculations and drew several charts.

File-level functions work faster under Insignia's SoftWindows on a Power Mac than they do on high-end PC hardware. Even on the low-priced Power Mac 6100/60, copying a file under SoftWindows was faster than copying it on a DEC PC based on a Pentium chip, the top-of-the-line Intel CPU.

In the tables below all numbers are times, in seconds; thus, the smaller the number, the better.

	Open windows from DOS	File Manager copy (15 MB)	DOS copy (15 MB)	Finder duplicate (15 MB)	Ami Pro search & replace	Ami Pro scroll	FreeHand zoom-out	Excel calculation/charting macro
Power Mac 6100 with SoftWindows	24.12	31.18	24.63	17.94	10.54	120.54	332.05	144.07
Power Mac 8100 with SoftWindows	19.82	29.96	24.39	17.62	10.01	106.09	230.76	114.25
486sx/25 PC	21.10	107.76	82.45		16.00	168.15	85.58	62.38
Pentium PC		46.63	38.21					
	

