From the Lab: New PowerBook Benchmarks

The PowerBook update that came at the end of January included a slight boost to the clock speed of the processors powering the Apple laptops. While the old PowerBooks came with either a 1.33GHz or 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor, the refreshed line now features a 1.5GHz G4 chip in its entry-level model. The high-end 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks ship with a 1.67GHz G4 processor.

Will this modest speed bump mean a measurable increase in performance? We’ve finished benchmarking most of the new PowerBooks (with the exception of the 17-inch 1.67GHz PowerBook G4, which has yet to arrive), and we can report that PowerBook performance has improved with this upgrade.

For the most part, the results followed a predictable pattern. The 15-inch 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 was faster than the new 1.5GHz models, which produced very similar results to the previous 1.5GHz models.

The only exception was the Compressor MPEG-2 encode test, in which the new 12-inch 1.5GHz model handily beat a 15-inch model with the same processor. The li’l 12-incher even beat the 1.67GHz model by a few seconds. We’re still trying to figure that one out.

Look for our full review of the new PowerBooks to appear soon. In the meantime, you can stay up-to-date on all PowerBook-related news by visiting Macworld ’s Mac Laptops page.

In the meantime, here are the results from our preliminary PowerBook tests:

PowerBook G4 Benchmarks

	SpeedMark 3.3	Cinema4D 8.5	iMovie HD Render	iTunes 4.7 MP3 encode	Photoshop CSSuite	Unreal Tournament	Compressor MPEG2 Encode
PowerBook 1.67GHz 15-inch	142	4:15	0:51	2:16	2:00	28.4	12:36
PowerBook 1.5GHz 15-inch	136	4:44	:56	2:30	2:02	25.5	13:55
PowerBook 1.5GHz 12-inch	136	4:36	:58	2:24	2:00	22.4	12:06
PowerBook 1.5GHz 15-inch (2004)	134	4:38	0:58	2:26	2:05	26.5	12:24
	>better	<better	<better	<better	<better	>better	<better

Best results in bold. Reference system in italics .

Speedmark 3.3 scores are relative to those of a 1GHz eMac which is assigned a score of 100. Photoshop, Cinema 4D,iMovie, and iTunes scores are in minutes:seconds. All systems were running Mac OS X 10.37. and 512MB RAM. We tested MP3 encoding with an audio-CD track that is 45 minutes long, converting it from the hard drive using iTunes’ High Quality setting. We used Unreal Tournament’s Antalus Botmatch Average Frames Per Second score tested at a resolution of 1,024-by-768 pixels. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50MB file. Photoshop’s memory was set to 75 percent and History was set to Minimum. For more information on Speedmark 3.3 visit www.macworld.com/speedmark .—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith.