Benchmarks: Quadra 650

The Quadra 650 uses a 33 MHz 68040 CPU, making it the second-fastest Quadra ever. Drive is a 250 MB Apple-branded Quantum ProDrive LPS formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.

The drive was tested with Norton and optimized before benchmarking.

Remember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

Speedometer 3.06

The system was tested on 3 November 1998 using System 7.5.5 with all inessential extensions off. Computer attached to a 14" color monitor and tested in 8-bit video mode (other modes caused Speedometer to crash). Results are relative to a Mac SE or Classic, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

The first set of numbers compares performance at different cache settings.

cache   CPU  graphics  disk   math 
 32KB  21.63   24.15   4.86   137.5
 64KB  21.90   24.30   4.89   137.6
128KB  21.90   24.45   4.91   137.4
256 KB  21.90   23.72   5.62   137.4

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. With this particular setup, cache size makes no appreciable difference.

Speedometer 4.02

The system was tested on 3 November 1998 under System 7.5.5 with all inessential extensions off. Computer attached to a 14" color monitor and tested in 8-bit video mode. Results are relative to a Quadra 605, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

These numbers compare performance at different cache settings.

cache  CPU  graphics  disk    math
 32KB  1.19   n/a     1.89   19.98
 64KB  1.19   1.34    1.89   20.01
128KB  1.19   n/a     1.91   20.01
256 KB  1.19   1.32    2.16   20.02

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. As above, with this particular setup, cache size makes no appreciable difference, except that the disk score is a bit higher with a 256 KB cache.

Surprisingly, although Mac fans have long believed IDE hard drives were inferior to SCSI drives, the Quadra 630 (the first desktop Mac with an IDE drive) offers virtually identical performance under MacBench 4.

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