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.


PowerPC Upgrades / can they keep up?

Not everyone can afford a Power Mac. Several upgrade alternatives can get you going at PowerPC speed. Overall, our tests show that a Quadra 700 and a Quadra 950 upgraded with Apple's $699 Power Macintosh Upgrade Card were as fast as a Power Mac 6100/60 and 7100/66, respectively. 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 a machine's 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 when performing 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 standard productivity tasks, using applications such as Word-Perfect and ClarisWorks.
Publishing Tasks
To perform a variety of publishing tasks, such as image processing, we used FreeHand, PageMaker, and Photoshop.
Rendering Tasks
For our rendering tasks, which involved floating-point operations, we used Infini-D, Painter, and VideoFusion.

	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 700	30.09	307.53	23.43	15.39	21.48	25.89	27.64
Macintosh Quadra 950	40.70	402.55	23.64	22.40	25.76	33.24	37.25
Quadra 700 with Power Macintosh Upgrade Card	122.49	2002.53	21.86	14.95	25.87	50.69	81.20
Quadra 950 with Power Macintosh Upgrade Card	163.17	2521.78	16.74	20.79	29.59	66.36	106.27
Power Macintosh 6100	119.33	3222.38	25.08	16.22	26.32	50.25	95.27
Power Macintosh 6100 (with optional L2 cache)	178.03	3433.12	29.63	16.84	34.51	60.66	112.55
Power Macintosh 7100 	167.11	4177.96	33.26	18.67	33.98	60.73	114.64
Power Macintosh 7100 (with optional L2 cache)	204.01	4327.54	34.55	20.21	41.82	67.05	125.68
Power Macintosh 8100 (L2 cache standard)	242.40	4525.06	36.12	22.28	46.49	78.54	146.74

