New Apple 867 MHz PowerBook G4 Really is Fast

Readers (Greg Wallace and Winston Tam) sent in several speed benchmarks for their 867 MHz PowerBook G4s. Their numbers are about what we had expected before we ran our speed tests. Here they are as compared with those from our 800 MHz PowerBook G4:

Test	Wallace's 867*	Tam's 867**	Our 800***
-
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)	3.1	3.2	2.8
Let1KWindowsBloom (sec)	38	32	53
Skidmarks GT - Integer	87	-	80
- Floating Point	87	-	80
- Vector	87	-	80

The faster CPU and graphics combine to significantly improve the speed of the 867 over the previous top-level 800.

We still have no idea why we got such identically poor performance out the two test 867s in our speed tests. Many readers wrote in suggesting that we didn't have the PowerBooks plugged into he AC adaptor or that we had the Energy Saver preference panel set for CPU cycling but, as we wrote in the article, both PowerBooks were plugged in and we made sure that the Energy Saver preference panel was set for highest performance.

The mystery remains but we are pleased to see that the new 867 MHz PowerBook G4 is a clear step above the previous models performance-wise.