How Fast Is It? Mac OS X 10.1 on a Beige G3

We have benchmarked each Mac OS X version with our 450 Mhz G4 Cube. While not the fastest Mac, the Cube is faster than most Beige and B&W G3's and most iMacs sold. Recently we had the opportunity to install Mac OS X 10.0.4 on a 266 MHz Beige G3 tower with 512 K backside cache running at 2:1 and 224 MB RAM. We ran our benchmarks, updated to Mac OS X 10.1 and ran them again. Here are the results compared with a 400 MHz iMac DV and the Cube:

Average Launch Times in Full Seconds with Mac OS X

Application	266 MHz Beige G3 - 10.0.4	266 MHz Beige G3 - 10.1	400 MHz G3 iMac - 10.1	450 MHz G4 Cube - 10.1
Startup Chime to Login	111	88	64	68
Login to Desktop	30	20	13	9
Shutdown	35	6	5	4
Classic Mode	76	74	44	46
Scroll in Acrobat 5	252	189	217	82
IE 5.1.2	11	3	2	2
System Preferences	7	3	2	1

While a bit slower than on either the iMac or Cube, Mac OS X 10.1 is perfectly usable on the 266 MHz Beige G3. The Beige G3 has an ATI Radeon graphics card but it is evident from the scrolling times of the Virtual PC 4.0 Manual PDF file that Mac OS X still doesn't use the graphics chip for 2D acceleration even in version 10.1.