[Spliff]

I downloaded the latest version of Xbench and ran it on my iMac G5 2.0 Ghz and was disappointed with the very poor "random uncached read" test. I did a comparison test with Intech SpeedTools and the results were the same.

Is this normal for the iMac G5 hard drive or is something defective in the disk controller?

Here are my results:

Random 26.86
Uncached Write 8.77 0.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 63.70 20.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 93.97 0.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 116.86 21.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[Eug Wanker]

Meh. Mine is also slow for the random (although not quite as slow). Don't worry about it.

[italiano]

There really isn't a good benchmark program for the Mac - PC's yes... I like to use "Show FPS" in games or FPS in the Marine Aquarium Screensaver to benchmark the performance of the video card/CPU other than that I find most of the benchmark programs for Mac are crap.

[Spliff]

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Meh. Mine is also slow for the random (although not quite as slow). Don't worry about it.

Uh, aren't those results insanely slow for a 7200 RPM drive? Maybe I don't understand the test, but I thought the results for a random read test should be in the megabytes/second realm, not the sub-megabyte realm.

[zign]

My results - 41.70

http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=125059

[cleanup]

Similar results here:

Random - 30.61

Uncached Write - 10.19 - 1.08 MB/sec (4K)
Uncached Write - 70.46 - 22.56 MB/sec (256K)
Uncached Read - 93.95 - 0.67 MB/sec (4K)
Uncached Read - 129.56 - 24.04 MB/sec (256K)

I'm not that tech savvy. I'm guessing this means that iMac G5 hard drives are unusually slow?

Rev B.

[discotronic]

This is from the Rev. A 17" 1.8GHz with 1GB RAM that I used to own:

200GB Western Digital hard drive:

Random 111.81
Uncached Write 109.23 1.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 124.82 28.15 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 97.80 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 119.29 24.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Stock hard drive:

Random 99.77
Uncached Write 94.29 1.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 101.52 22.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 92.55 0.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 113.22 23.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]

This is my current 1.8GHz PowerMac

200GB Western Digital hard drive:

Random 122.13
Uncached Write 122.87 1.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 144.86 32.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 103.21 0.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 124.67 25.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[Spliff]

Originally Posted by discotronic

This is from the Rev. A 17" 1.8GHz with 1GB RAM that I used to own:

So it looks like the results are normal and nothing to worry about.

[discotronic]

I just downloaded the newest version of Xbench. The last version I had used was 1.1.3 and the new version is 1.2. The overall score on my PowerMac dropped to 70.75 from 177.49.

I ran it twice and came up with almost the same score. Under the old version of Xbench my old G3 iBook 900MHz is almost as fast as as my current G5.

The bottom line is that Xbench sucks. They changed the baseline and now doing a comparison takes a bit to get used to.