Mac speedmark ratings.

brain29

Member
Nov 30, 2002
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Maybe someone here could help me understand this. I have two roomates and they are both Mac users along with practically all of my friends. I was looking through Macworld one day and came to the Macworld Lab Tests. They had all the current laptop and desktop laps listed with feathures and speedmark 3.3 ratings. From my first glance it seems that the scores are directly proportional to the price of the system. I can handle that. But when comparing the 1.25 GHz Powerook w/512 mb ram and ATI 9600M 64 MB to the iMac with same processor speed but 256 mb ram and Nvidia FZ 5200 Ultra 64mb, the scores favored the iMac. The powerbook scores were 113 while the iMac score was 121.

Now I'm no expert with Macs or Speedmark, but that doesnt make sence to me. Shouldn't the computer with more ram score better? I hope that just the difference in Graphics chips couldn't make up the difference.

Can anyone explain this??
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
24,038
1,662
126
Speedmark 3.3

Part of the test depends on hard drive access. It's a global system test, and the iMac's 7200 rpm drive would obviously destroy the PowerBook's 4200 rpm laptop drive. OTOH, the PowerBook's Radeon 9600 is faster than the iMac's GeForce FX 5200.

Bottom line: The 1.25 GHz G4 is fine for business app use, surfing, iTunes, etc., but it's slow for things like gaming and MPEG-2 encoding.
 

brain29

Member
Nov 30, 2002
54
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Yeah I didn't think about the hard drives being different speeds. In the chart it just lists them both as having 80gb Ultra ATA. I just noticed that it says the iMac has a faster system bus (167mhz). It doesn't say what the bus is for the powerbook. That may be the difference, if the Powerbook is 133mhz.
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
24,038
1,662
126
Originally posted by: brain29
Yeah I didn't think about the hard drives being different speeds. In the chart it just lists them both as having 80gb Ultra ATA. I just noticed that it says the iMac has a faster system bus (167mhz). It doesn't say what the bus is for the powerbook. That may be the difference, if the Powerbook is 133mhz.
The PowerBook is 167 also.