Benchmarks: Mac Classic

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Mac Classic The Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. Drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with Silverlining. (This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.)

Remember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

Speedometer 3.06

The system was tested on 22 November 2000 using System 7.1 and System 7.5.5 with extensions off. Results for a Mac Classic should be 1.0, since it is the norm for Speedometer 3.

These numbers compares performance under 7.1 and 7.5.5 with two different hard drives, the internal ELS170S and an external Quantum Fireball ST2.1S. The disk cache is set to 128 KB for all tests.

OS/drive   CPU  graphics  disk   math
7.1/170    1.00   0.99    ----   1.00
7.1/2.1    0.99   0.99    1.62   1.00
7.5.5/170  0.99   0.99    1.51   0.99
7.5.5/2.1  0.99   0.99    1.63   0.99

There is no significant difference between System 7.1 and 7.5.5. The faster, newer Quantum 2.1 GB drive outperforms the internal drive by about 5%.

These numbers show virtually identical performance to the Mac SE, the computer the Classic replaced.

Speedometer 4.02

Speedometer 4 doesn't run on 68000-based Macs.

Hard Drive and Memory Speed

The newest addition to our benchmark suite is TimeDrive 1.3 (available here), which measures drive throughput. This can test a floppy, Zip, hard drive, or RAM Disk. TimeDrive is fairly primitive; the benefit of that is being able to run it on very old Macs.

The Quantum ELS170S is a older SCSI hard drive with good performance for its era (circa 1995). We also tested our default external drive, a Quantum Fireball ST2.1S. (Numbers are KB/sec.)

drive              write     read 
Quantum ELS170S      593K     683K
Quantum ST2.1S       597K     688K

Tests with other Macs show the ST2.1S runs faster then 4 Mbps, so the 597K write and 688K read ceilings seems to be a limit on the Classic's SCSI throughput.