Hands-On Review 17" PowerBook G4, How Fast is It?

The new 17" Powerbook G4 1 GHz is shipping in quantity now so we were finally able to get our hands on one to run our speed tests. Our first impressions at Macworld 2003 SF are archived here.

The 17" PowerBook G4 1 GHz seems huge when one first sees it. The screen is very bright and monsterously large. But until one sees it next to the 15" Powerbook G4, which also has a "huge" screen, one doen't really appreciate how large the new 17" PowerBook's screen really is. The 15" PowerBook G4 is thought of as a desktop replacement but the 17" PowerBook G4 is clearly a desktop replacement. Still, it is only 1" thin and only a pound an a half heavier than its 15" sister.

As we mentioned before, we love the hinge on the new 17" and 12" PowerBooks. They are very similar to the iBook's hinge so they appear much stronger than the 15" PowerBook's and minimize the height of the screen when open. This overcomes two complaints about the 15" Powerbook G4. In fact, the open 17" screen looks only a tiny bit higher than the 15" screen when open which is good for use on airplanes. Still, there are compaints that the new hinge is not "stiff" enough. That is, the screen falls open or closes on its own when the PowerBook is not on a flat surface. We observed this in the model we tested. The hinge needs to be tightened up just a bit.

The design of the 17" PowerBook G4 resolves another design deficiency of the 15" model, the battery latch. The 17" model has two latches, the battery is centered and the latches move from front to back to release the battery. It is unlikely that one will accidentally release the battery when picking up the new 17" model, something that is too easy to do accidentally on the 15" model. However, we still like the lock on the 12" PowerBook and iBook better.

The screen latch is a double mechanism making it much less likely to break that the 15" model.

Finally, we really like the new aluminum case. Titanium is really cool but it is painted. The anodized aluminum of the new PowerBooks feels stronger and less slippery. We are sure that it will prove to be more scratch resistant and not have the paint bubbling problems of the Titanium models.

So how fast is the new 17" PowerBook G4? It has a 1 GHz 7455 Apollo v3.3 G4 CPU, a 167 MHz system bus and fast DDR RAM. It also has an NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip with 64 MB DDR VRAM. We ran our usual tests on it. The results, along with those from our PowerBook G4 800 (ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility graphics with 32 MB VRAM) and G4 Cube 1.2 GHz (GeForce3 graphics with 64 MB VRAM), are shown below:

Speed Tests (scores or secs). Green is faster.

Test	PBG4 17"	PBG4 800	G4 Cube 1.2 GHz
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)	3.6	2.8	4.2
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering	93	73	108
- C4D Shading	117	93	125
-OpenGL SW	318	219	349
-OpenGL HW	163	130	615
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)	31	50	30
Skidmarks GT 3.0	100	80	120
Xbench 1.0 - CPU	112	89	139
- Threading	65	51	74
- Memory	125	94	94
- Quartz Graphics	118	99	123
- OpenGL Graphics	128	83	130
- User Interface Graphics	111	83	117
- Hard Disk	53	41	89
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)	52	67	47
Shutdown (sec)	11	12	10
Launch Classic Mode (sec)	17	27	17
Scroll 142p File in Acrobat Reader (sec)	28	34	33
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)	75	55	65

Our upgraded G4 Cube is generally the faster of the three but the 17" PowerBook G4 equals or betters our Cube in several tests. The new 17" model is much faster all around than our less-than-one-year-old 800 MHz 15" PowerBook G4.

We really love our 15" Titanium but we're probably going to replace it with a new 17" model sometime soon.