Power Mac G4 DP 1.42 GHz--How Fast Is It?

We just got our hands on the fastest Power Mac G4 that Apple has ever made. It has dual Motorola G4 processors running at 1.42 GHz but, of course, it was discontinued last month when the new Power Mac G5s were announced at WWDC 2003. The DP 1.42 is no longer available from Apple's on line or retail stores but there may still be a few of them available in the retail channel.

So why are we testing it? Because we want to be able to compare, using our own benchmarks, the fastest Power Mac G4 with a new, even faster, Power Mac G5 DP 2 GHz that we have on order. That comparo will have to wait until late next month or early September and the G4 DP 1.42's are already scarce.

Until we got the DP 1.42, our hottest Mac was a black, souped-up Cube running on a 1.2 GHz G4 CPU upgrade from PowerLogix--see our recent review. We have also added a fast 80 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda IV and a GeForce3 video card to our Cube and bumped the RAM to 1 GB.

While we wait for our G5, we ran a comparo between our wicked Cube and the fastest Power Mac G4 ever made by Apple. Here are some salient specifications for both machines:

Spec	PM G4 DP 1.42	G4 Cube
CPU(s) GHz/Type	2-1.42/7455 v3.3	1-1.2/7455 v3.3
System Bus (MHz)	167	100
RAM (MB/Speed)	512/333 DDR	1000/PC 100 SDR
Graphics	ATI 9000 Pro	NVIDIA GeForce3
Hard Drive (Size/RPM)	120 GB/7200	80 GB/7200

We ran our usual set of speed tests, i.e. several benchmarking applications and several so-called "real world" tests--see this web page for an explanation of them. Here are the results for both machines running Mac OS X 10.2.6 as averages of three tests with a fresh reboot in between:

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

Test	PowerMac G4 DP 1.42 GHz	Cube G4 SP 1.2 GHz
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)	9.8	4.2
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering (SP)	135	108
- Rendering (DP)	242	n/a
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting	575	620
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)	25	31
Skidmarks GT 3.0	142	120
Xbench 1.0 - CPU	178	138
- Threading	175	74
- Memory	159	92
- Quartz Graphics	156	124
- OpenGL Graphics	146	121
- User Interface Graphics	156	117
- Hard Disk	96	90
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)	53	48
Shutdown (sec)	10	10
Launch Classic Mode (sec)	16	17
Copy 160 MB File (sec)	11	13
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)	24	33
Encode MP3 in iTunes 3.0.1 (sec)	53	104
Export QT Movie in iMovie 3.0.1 (sec)	22	36
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)	140	64