TiBook 500 vs Pismo 400--How Fast Is It?

Our 500 MHz PowerBook G4 Titanium (TiBook) arrived Thursday. We spent the weekend setting it up to take over from our just year-old 400 MHz PowerBook 2000 (Pismo). Our Pismo will be offered on eBay very soon.

The Pismo has been outstanding, clearly the best all around computer we've ever used. It is powerful enough to replace a desktop for almost everyone but the seriously addicted online 3D gamer and even then it runs Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament respectably. Weighing in at just under 6 pounds with a 14.1" TFT screen and a cool shape, the curvy sleek black Pismo has been the king of laptops since its introduction at Macworld in Tokyo a year ago last February.

However, in January 2001 at Macworld in San Francisco Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a worthy replacement, the fabulous TiBook, with a G4 CPU, slot-loading DVD drive, 5.3 pounds in a titanium metal case and an incredible 1152x768 15.2" TFT screen. The Pismo's 14.1" screen is terrific but from the first time we saw the TiBook's 15.2" screen we were filled with lust and just had to have one. The G4 CPU would also be a help with the graphically intense Mac OS X which we have adopted as our primary OS since its release March 24th.

A month ago we compared the new 500 MHz iBook with our Pismo and declared a tie. Basically it boiled down to a choice of screen size and ports (PCMCIA and infrared) versus portability. The TiBook comes a lot closer on portability, 5.3# vs 5.9# in weight and in screen height when open, but the new iBook is the king of portability beating out our trusty G3-upgraded 2400c in last month's comparison. The TiBook's strength, like the Pismo's, is power. If you need a portable for video or graphics work, then nothing much else matters beyond the CPU's MHz and the Altivec engine of the G4 CPU. You need read no further. If screen real estate is your primary concern then you also need read no further. But how about the rest of us? Should we trade in our year-old PowerBooks for a TiBook based on its performance? Just how fast is it?

We put our new TiBook and venerable (if one year makes it so) Pismo though our standard suite of tests with Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X 10.0.4. Here are the results for Mac OS 9.1:

Test	500 MHz TiBook	400 MHz Pismo
Walker 1.2 Spin (min fps)	42	36
ThroughPut 1.5 - CPU (MB/s)	50	50
- FPU (MB/s)	83	83
- Altivec (MB/s)	125	--
- CopyBits (MB/s)	172	123
Gauge Pro 1.1 Memory Speed (MB/s)	221	90
Scroll VPC 4 Manual (sec)	42	55
Cinebench 2000 - Shading, OpenGL (score)	6.5	4.5
- Raytracing (score)	6.2	4.8
MacBench 5.0 - CPU (score)	1571	1145
- FPU (score)	1900	1318
- Disk (score)	1217	1651
- Graphics (score)	3456	2957

Not unsurprisingly, the TiBook beats the Pismo hands down because of its faster CPU clock speed and G4 Altivec engine. The difference is about 25 per cent as expected. The Pismo has a third party IBM Travelstar 20 GB hard drive which is faster, according to MacBench, than the TiBook's OEM 20 GB drive.

We mentioned 3D gaming. The TiBook got 29 frames per second on Quake III Arena v1.17 Demo1 versus 28 on the Pismo. Q3A was set at 800x600 resolution and 16-bit color but all the other visual settings were set high with the sound settings set low. Both are perfectly playable but if desired the frame rate can be improved by degrading the visuals.

Here are the results for Mac OS X:

Application (sec)	500 MHz TiBook	400 MHz Pismo
Scroll VPC 4 Manual	73	110
AppleWorks 6.2	6	8
RBrowser v2.88.7	10	12
OmniWeb 4.0.1	10	10
Start Up Classic Mode	38	61

Scrolling the 144p Virtual PC 4.0 Manual PDF in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 is much slower in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9.1. Again, the TiBook is faster as expected and generally in proportion to the higher clock speed, i.e. 500 MHz vs 400 MHz. For things that take a long time in Mac OS X like scrolling PDF's and starting up Classic mode, this increase in speed is welcome.

Here is an example of the speed potential (measured in floating operations per second--flops) of the G4 with its Altivec engine using an application called Altivec Fractal Carbon in Mac OS X:

	500 MHz TiBook	400 MHz Pismo
No Windows Open (megaflops)	1569	225
Many Windows Open (megaflops)	678	85

With no other applications running and no other windows open, the TiBook measures at 1.6 gigaflops while the Pismo only measures 225 megaflops. In Mac OS X, running applications and open widows have a great effect on the system's performance. We opened Adobe Acrobat 5.0, AppleWorks 6.2, OmniWeb 4.0.1, Sharity 2.4, iMovie and iTunes along with the Finder, System Preferences and Classic mode. The result was to reduce the performance of Altivec Fractal Carbon by about 60 percent.

We are quite pleased with the performance of the TiBook. However, a 500 MHz Pismo would probably equal the scores and timings of the 500 MHz TiBook that we performed here except for the Altivec Fractal Carbon runs. Considering speed alone, the 400 or 500 MHz Pismos are the current value leaders except for applications that use the G4's Altivec engine like several of the Adobe Photoshop filters, SoundJam MP and iTunes. Mac OS X does not seem to use the G4's Altivec engine yet.

Of course, we love the TiBook's light weight, low screen height, screen size and beautiful design.