New Apple 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4--How Fast Is It?
Despite having a dual 2.5Ghz Power Mac G5 and a 30" Cinema Display, we mostly use our PowerBook. We do so largely because we are on the road for at least half the time and keeping our files sync'ed, especially email, is still more than a bit of a PITA. Our Power Mac G5 is used mainly for big image jobs and, of course, 3D gaming, our favorite post freeway drive stress reducer. But since we traded our 23" Cinema Display for the new 30" Cinema we have been unable to use the larger display with our PowerBook. One day syncing email actually will be easy and one day someone will make Mac OS X drivers for external USB PC card adapters for cell network wireless cards. Then, we'll replace our 17" PowerBook with a much easier to tote 12" model and use our Power Mac G5 for more things. But until those days come, Apple's 17" PowerBook will continue to be our main Mac and now it drives our 30" Cinema Display.
Apple's backlit keyboard came out with the original 17" PowerBook G4. It is a great idea, one that we championed as a road warrior for a long time before Apple implemented it. Unfortunately, its implementation is too dim under too many low light conditions that we encounter. It tended to make the keys completely unreadable too often so we mostly had it turned off. The latest rendition in the 1.67GHz model is terrific. The keys are bright and readable under all low light conditions that we have encountered so far.
Another very useful feature of the new PowerBooks is two-finger scrolling trackpads. A hack is available for earlier PowerBooks but Apple's simple implementation works seamlessly and flawlessly in our experience.
There's also Apple's new Sudden Motion Sensor technology. SMS is designed to protect the new PowerBook's hard drive from damage in a fall. We've been lucky in that department for many years and we hope we never have to test the new technology. Still, it's comforting to know that it's there.
On the speed side, the 1.67Ghz G4 CPU is 11% faster and the 100GB 5400RPM hard drive is 29% faster as well as 25% larger. The SuperDrive at 8x is also faster. The new PowerBooks have the faster Bluetooth v2.0 wireless specification even though there are no 2.0 accessories at present. They will come.
So how fast is it? To find out, we ran our standard suite of tests on our current 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook G4 and on our new 1.67GHz model, both running the newly released version of Mac OS X, 10.3.8. Using 10.3.8 makes the comparison fairer since the new 1.67GHz models shipped with a late version of 10.3.7 that appears to have included the new graphics drivers contained in 10.3.8. Our speed tests include several "canned" benchmark applications and several so-called "real world" tests all of which can be easily run on anyone's computer for comparison.
Here are the results:
| Test | 1.5GHz |
1.67GHz
|
Change
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmarks: |
Model
|
Model
|
%
|
| Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS) |
5.3
|
5.8
|
9
|
|
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
|
137
|
147
|
7
|
|
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
|
810
|
851
|
5
|
| Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec) |
37
|
33
|
11
|
| Xbench 1.1.3 - CPU |
172
|
196
|
14
|
| - Threading |
130
|
142
|
9
|
| - Memory |
134
|
136
|
1
|
| - Quartz Graphics |
184
|
189
|
3
|
| - OpenGL Graphics |
127
|
141
|
11
|
| - User Interface Graphics |
225
|
236
|
5
|
| - Hard Disk |
54
|
71
|
31
|
| "Real World" Tests: | |||
| Startup (sec) |
58
|
51
|
12
|
| Shutdown (sec) |
51
|
48
|
6
|
| Launch Classic Mode (sec) |
14
|
11
|
21
|
| Duplicate 700 MB Folder w/3600 Files (sec) |
121
|
79
|
35
|
| Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec) |
48
|
46
|
4
|
| Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec) |
104
|
104
|
0
|
| Export QT Movie in iMovie (sec) |
108
|
68
|
37
|
| Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec) |
109
|
109
|
0
|
The new PowerBook's faster G4 CPU and hard drive combine to provide fairly significant speed increases almost across the board. The only surprise to us is the lack of any speed increase in running the 3D game Quake III Arena. As an aside, shutdown takes longer than usual because we have FileVault enabled on our PowerBooks. At shutdown, FileVault checks the encrypted drive image for disk space that can be reclaimed.
In summary, Apple's new 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 delivers a significant increase in speed and features, all for $100 less than its 1.5 GHz predecessor. The new model's faster 8x SuperDrive, a feature not tested, will certainly provide faster DVD burns with the right media than the previous model. With its new features, speed increase and lower price, Apple's newest top-end 17" PowerBook G4 is well worth a trade up for power users. [Bill Fox]
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