Low End Mac Benchmarks

Mac Plus

Dan Knight - 2000.10.08 - Tip Jar

The Plus uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. Drive is a 160 MB Quantum. The computer has 4 MB of memory. Because it is an older design, the Plus is generally considered to be about 15% slower than the SE and Classic. Since Speedometer 3 sets the Classic to 1.0 for all four tests, the numbers will quickly show where the Plus falls short.

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 8 October 2000 using System 7.5.5. Results are relative to a Mac Classic, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

The first set of numbers compares performance at different cache settings.

cache    CPU   graphics  disk    math
 32KB    0.87    0.91    0.67    0.99
 64KB    0.87    0.91    0.67    0.99
128KB    0.87    0.91    0.67    0.99
256KB    0.87    0.91    0.57    0.99

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. With this particular setup, cache size makes no appreciable difference except at 256KB, where it actually reduces performance.

The Mac Plus isn't quite as slow as conventional wisdom would have us believe. Hard drives vary from setup to setup, but SCSI throughput has always been the Plus' Achilles' heel. Other than that, the Plus offers 87% of the CPU performance of the SE and Classic, 91% of the graphics speed, and almost identical math performance.

Speedometer 4.02

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

Go to the Plus profile.

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