At 11:45 AM +1000 6/11/04, James Allan wrote:
My 8600/G3 (300MHz, 384Mb RAM, 50MHz bus, Rage 128) is dog slow compared to all my other Panther machines I have. An iBook 500 (256Mb RAM, 66MHz bus, 8Mb Rage 128 Mobility) and a Pismo 400 (384Mb RAM, 100MHz bus, same graphics) are both a lot snappier, despite having inferior graphics, and in the case of the iBook, a similar bus speed. On paper, it doesn't look like it should be as slow as it is. Would sticking in a fast G4 (say 700MHz) make all that much difference to the 8600, or does its weaknesses lie elsewhere, like the hard drives?
Use Thousands of Colors for better graphics performance on all these older machines.
Unfortunately, the graphics are not necessarily better in your 8600. They are running through the PowerSurge (PMac 7300-8600) PCI bus which has *much* lower data throughout than the AGP slots in both the iBook and Pismo. The 16MB on the PCI card does not completely make up for this. Also the addition of slower data transfer on the system bus and hard drive (and 10MB/sec SCSI throughput as described by Gerald and Peter) will contribute to slower performance.
Head over to Xbench's web site <http://www.xbench.com> and have a look at the Quartz and User Interface scores for PowerSurge machines compared to similar CPU clock speed iBooks and Pismos. The lower Q and UI scores for the PowerSurge machines are an indication of the limitations in throughput in these machines. I've benchmarked a number of these myself under similar circumstances (fresh Panther install) and the Quartz & UI on the machines with faster memory throughput and larger, faster L2 caches always get higher numbers. This suggests higher performance in real-world usage as well.
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