iBook 14" 700 MHz--How Fast Is It?

Much bigger and a pound heavier than the current 12.1" iBook model and deemed the "Son of Pismo" by one popular PowerBook web site, the 14" iBook is said to be highly popular. We got one to replace our excellent but aging original blueberry iBook. It's not bigger and heavier than the original iBook that it is replacing, it's screen is much bigger, it is about a pound lighter and it is a whole lot faster.

We love the new 14" iBook. It's a real beauty and has a great 14" screen like the previous PowerBook G3s. It comes with 256 MB RAM and a DVD/CD-RW combo optical drive but because of its size and weight it is not an easy traveler like the 12" iBook or even the PowerBook G4 Titanium. However, it is a superb, less expensive home/office 'Book. We understand why it sells so well.

But how fast is it? We compared it with a 500 MHz iBook Combo (384 MB RAM), an 800 MHz PowerBook G4 Titanium (512 MB RAM) and 800 MHz G4 iMac (256 MB RAM). Here are the results:

Action	iBook 500	iBook 14"	TiBook	iMac 800
SpeedRun 1.1.3 - Total Score	194	288	315	294
- Graphics	123	193	304	259
- Hard Disk	145	273	360	307
- Processor	172	234	194	196
- RAM	334	452	402	413
SpeedX 1.2-Typ. Ins. (MIPS)	468	638	600	608
- Fast Integer Ins. (BIPS)	0.99	1.30	2.30	2.30
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)	0.34	0.47	2.80	2.80
Launch Classic (sec)	74	40	50	45
Let1kWindowsBloom (sec)	88	58	41	46
AppleWorks Scroll 100p (sec)	25	17	16	12
Quake III Arena (fps)*	9	35	70	44

The 14" 700 MHz iBook is surprisingly fast, even surpassing our new 800 MHz TiBook in the SpeedRun processor and RAM tests and SpeedX's typical instructions test. It even launches Classic mode in Mac OS X 10.1.5 faster than our 800 MHz TiBook and iMac. Of course, the 700 MHz 14" iBook is much faster than our 500 MHz 12.1" iBook. One can also play Quake III Arena on the new 700 MHz 14" at much higher resolutions. At 640x480 and 16-bit color the 12" 500 MHz iBook gets an okay 28 fps vs the 47 fps of the 14" 700 MHz iBook.

We were surprised by how well the new 700 MHz 14" iBook did. It clearly rivals the new flat panel iMac as the best home/consumer computer and, if weight and vertical screen size are not major issues, it rivals even the TiBook in value.