[mrweirdo]

Hey I just recently ran Xbench on an eMac I use at my college for one of my classes and posted it on my blog. I thought I would share it with you just to see how it stacks up.
Linky

Are those results good or bad ? Thanks

[discotronic]

My iBook G3 900 only scores a couple points lower in the overall score. I'm not sure if that is a good score for the eMac or not.

[iREZ]

Tad below average if you ask me, you sure you werent running any programs in the background when running your bench? Still its a 800MHz eMac so you cant really expect too high a number. Just so you know the way I judge these things is as follows

150+ is considered really fast
125+is pretty quick
100+the norm for now
75+ehhhhh
anything below sell and upgrade

Sorry if I offend anybody, no flames please.

[Lateralus]

<--- 160. Not an eMac though.

Incase you're curious, results are linked in my sig.

[NickGra]

I just ordered a 1.25 ghz/ 80 gig/ 512mb RAM/ Superdrive/ eMac today! I'm so excited. How do you run Xbench though? Does it come with Panther?

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by NickGra:
I just ordered a 1.25 ghz/ 80 gig/ 512mb RAM/ Superdrive/ eMac today! I'm so excited. How do you run Xbench though? Does it come with Panther?

You can download it here. It is pretty self explanatory once you open the app; basically just click the start button. It will then run through the tests, and when it is finished, it will give you the results for all of the individual tests and an over all score.

It is best to run Xbench after a reboot and with no applications running. Also best not to use the machine while the tests are running, just sit back and watch.

Xbench can be finnicky, so I'd run it about 3 times and take the best score.

[Will C]

If you look on the xbench results page for emacs, it seems most 1.25GHz eMacs are getting a score of about 135 for xbench - some a bit higher some lower - I was pleased since I ran it on mine and got 135 - and I have not added extar RAM yet (so I suspect it makes little difference to the xbench score but will of course help with real world use)

[MacJason]

I tested my new eMac today and got a score of 135.07 the first time and 130.07 the second time. I actually think you get better Xbench results with less RAM (that�s what I�ve heard anyway . . .)

[Graymalkin]

Originally posted by iREZ:

150+ is considered really fast
125+is pretty quick
100+the norm for now
75+ehhhhh

You're being a little harsh with lower scoring Macs. My 12" Rev. A Powerbook for instance scores a 78 when I include the disk benchmark and a 97 without it. It is by no means an "ehhh" system despite its low score from the slower laptop hard drive it has. The baseline system all XBench scores are normalized to has a 7200rpm drive with an 8MB buffer. Any lesser hard drive skews your results for the worse.

[Krusty]

I Xbenched in 130-132 range with my new 1.25/SD/160gb/512mb system. This compares to about 40 that I got with my DV iMac (450mhz/384mb). Most notably with this new eMac vs the old iMac are:
CPU: ~150 vs ~24 (>6x improvement at < 3x the nominal clock speed - WOW!!)
Disk: as reported by some others, the HD that seems to be showing up in the 160gb systems is a Seagate 7200rpm w/8mb cache. I got some uncached sequential reads in the mid-50's to up to 62.9mb/sec transfer speed. Holy cow !! That compares to the upgraded Seagate in my DV iMac that got top reading in the mid to upper 20's (which was an improvement over the stock Maxtor 5400rpm that got reads in the 19-20 range).

Other comments on the new machine (some nitpicky, I know)

Monitor: crisp w/no coloration problems. Though I was surprised by the "darkness" of this monitor even after calibrated. I can adjust the brightness but full brightness is about like middle brightness on my iMac DV.

Speakers: This is my only "WTF" about this machine. Apple's eMac page boasts of "thunderous" sound from 16w (8w x 2) internal speakers (vs 2.5w x 2) in my iMac DV. I use an iSub as well (with both machines). This thing is not only not louder, I think it may be a bit quieter than my DV iMac overall. Which sucks ... the iMac DV/w iSub was almost loud enough for me to use in lieu of a stereo, I was hoping the 16 "thunderous" watts in the eMac + iSub would have been a pretty big improvement. Its NOT an improvement at all.

Fan noise: Not loud but definitely audible. I glance lovingly over at my DV iMac that is sitting nearby for file transfer to the new machine. Guess 4.5 years of slient computing are over

Quartz Extreme: Expose, Fast User Switching, et al worked fine on my DV iMac even though they were not QE accelerated.. But I really didn't realize how much more fluid things are with QE. Very Slick.

Bluetooth: I had an external bluetooth adapter on my old iMac DV (for my cell phone). I got internal on the new eMac since I knew I would use it. I've been able to zap files via bluetooth between the two machines w/o problem Very cool (even though I've used FW target disk mode and ethernet for most of the "heavy lifting" of large file transfer ... its convenient and downright fun to use BT now that the 2 machines no longer have a physical connection to one another).

[edit] add one more thing about keyboard.
I like the new keyboard a lot as far a look, feel, and responsiveness of the keys. What I don't like are:
no spaces between grouping of the function keys. Makes it a little harder to zero in on the exact function key you want.
No "border" to the left or right of the keys. My old apple pro keyboard had a small border on either side. Depending on what I'm doing, I either have the keyboard in my lap or on a desk. It is nearly impossible to move this keyboard between two positions without inadverntently hitting some key unless you pick it up and move it with two hands. I've accidently ejected DVDs/CDs about 6 or 7 times in the last few days
USB ports. I like the old location on the sides. I think the new location is a little less friendly as the wires/dongles/keychain drives are either running across my legs (if its in my lap) or out toward the CRT if is on the desk.

[spookykids]

hmmmz...

i got a total of 68... not very good at all.

is this normal for my 15" 800 mhz imac with 768 ram? i used to get 75-80 the last few times i did this, a few months ago

[sjk]

Originally posted by Krusty:
IMonitor: crisp w/no coloration problems. Though I was surprised by the "darkness" of this monitor even after calibrated. I can adjust the brightness but full brightness is about like middle brightness on my iMac DV.

What resolution are you using? I wouldn't call mine "crisp" running @ 1280x960, compared with the 1024x768 LCD display on my 12" G3 iBook. I'm satisfied with the brightness. Do you know where calibration prefs are saved and/or a way to reset them if something's botched doing it? I've never tried it before.

Hard drive is the Seagate ST3160023A. Running "iostat 5" I've seen about 35MB/s max transfer rate. I haven't run Xbench but now you've got me curious to try it.

I'm also underwhelmed by the speakers, but they're certainly an improvement over what's in my wife's old Toshiba notebook. Since she's getting this system when I upgrade that's what's important.

Fan noise: Not loud but definitely audible.

The in-window AC noise behind my eMac overrides its fan. It's recently gotten too hot/humid here lately to run without AC, for both the machine's and my sake. The fan in a friend's Toshiba A35 notebook I was de-virusing last week was more obnoxious than the eMac's.

I'm considering getting an amp (Griffin PowerWave looks tempting) to drive my Sennheiser HD-580 headphones, which are comfortable enough to wear for hours at a time. The background noise of the AC and eMac fan may "blend" better with headphones than with external speakers (like I'm doing now). Or maybe I'll pick up some cheaper headphones. Either way, I don't expect to do "serious" listening in my home office.

Quartz Extreme: Expose, Fast User Switching, et al worked fine on my DV iMac even though they were not QE accelerated.. But I really didn't realize how much more fluid things are with QE. Very Slick.

Pretty much everything on the eMac is like softened butter in comparison with refrigerated butter interaction with my iBook.

I got an internal Bluetooth module even tho' I don't have any BT devices (yet).

I like the new keyboard a lot as far a look, feel, and responsiveness of the keys. What I don't like are: ...

My big issue with the keyboard is having separate keys for home, end, page-up/down. Page navigation is much easier using <fn>-<arrow> on my iBook since I could toggle the function key when necessary instead of having to awkwardly reach for separate keys. That alone may be the factor that drives me to get a different keyboard. I'm already used to the clackyness. Oh, being "old school" I'd prefer the control key be where caps lock is but I managed to get used to it on the iBook. control-option-command on the eMac use the same space as fn-control-option-command on the iBook which I'm still getting used to when switching between the two.

I've also accidentally held down the enter key on the numeric keypad with the palm of my hand that's also resting on the mouse. First time I did that it accepted defaults for the second disk of Software Install & Restore(!) I'd repartitioned the drive and wanted to leave out Classic and a couple other things. I managed to Force Quit it (funky thing has no menu) pretty quickly but I'm not sure if it installed anything. There's stuff under /Applications (Mac OS 9)/ and /System Folder/ folders which looks like it's from AppleWorks. Installing AppleWorks on my iBook didn't leave anything there. I'll eventually dissect the image files and see if I can determine anything that needs cleanup.

The USB port locations don't matter much since I need a 2.0 hub anyway (any recommendations?). The keyboard USB port has already proven to be convenient when HotSync'ing my Tungsten E PDA.

I paid $75 for the 256->512MB RAM upgrade from Apple, figuring I'd have no use for 256MB anyway and that was a fair deal for 512MB. I added a 1GB DIMM from transintl.com on Monday. In hindsight, I could have just ordered the eMac with 256MB and still added the 1GB, saving $75 and having only 256MB less total RAM. I'm not regretting it, tho', since I got $75 off on my original purchase anyway.

I bought a new stand through eBay. It blocks the memory bay so I'm glad not to have to go in there again.

This system is plenty capable of handling a diversity of tasks with quite adequate speed. Still haven't tried GarageBand and iDVD since I've been busy migrating data from the iBook. Anyway, I'm satisfied with everything so far.

.

[Krusty]

Originally posted by sjk:
What resolution are you using? I wouldn't call mine "crisp" running @ 1280x960, compared with the 1024x768 LCD display on my 12" G3 iBook. I'm satisfied with the brightness. Do you know where calibration prefs are saved and/or a way to reset them if something's botched doing it? I've never tried it before.

Yes, in Display Preferences hit the "color" button. You can recalibrate and you will be prompted to save it as a new profile after you are done. You can very simply switch back to the old profile if need. BTW, I switched to the sRGB profile and the monitor is now about as bright as I like/remember. So, that prob is solved for me. I'm running 1152x864. 1280x960 is just a little too low on the refresh for me -- though I may give it a try sometime for a while and see how I like it.

Originally posted by sjk:

Hard drive is the Seagate ST3160023A. Running "iostat 5" I've seen about 35MB/s max transfer rate. I haven't run Xbench but now you've got me curious to try it.

The 62.9 may be an anomaly. Most readings were in the 53-55mb range with this one really high reading. I'll run it a few more times sometime to see if I can repeat that performance. Still quite a speed bump (considering that the HD in my iMac DV is the exact same model but with only 80gb and 2mb cache).

Originally posted by sjk:

I'm also underwhelmed by the speakers, but they're certainly an improvement over what's in my wife's old Toshiba notebook.

I just don't get it. They should be louder. They just aren't

Originally posted by sjk:

Pretty much everything on the eMac is like softened butter in comparison with refrigerated butter interaction with my iBook.

Good analogy

Originally posted by sjk:

I got an internal Bluetooth module even tho' I don't have any BT devices (yet).My big issue with the keyboard is having separate keys for home, end, page-up/down. Page navigation is much easier using <fn>-<arrow> on my iBook since I could toggle the function key when necessary instead of having to awkwardly reach for separate keys

You don't have to use those separate keys. Experiment with Option + arrow, Command + arrow, etc. You'll find behavior similar to what you were used to with the iBook . You may never need the Bluetooth, but hey, getting everything internal that you can is important with an all-in-one.

Originally posted by sjk:

The USB port locations don't matter much since I need a 2.0 hub anyway (any recommendations?). The keyboard USB port has already proven to be convenient when HotSync'ing my Tungsten E PDA.

I have a hub. But the dual-ended keyboard was very convenient for my bluetooth adapter and keychain hard drive as my hub is located in a not-too-easily accesible spot. No hub recommendation, I'm afraid .. I have a very old 1.1 hub. I'll be looking for a good USB 2.0 hub myself sometime soon.

Originally posted by sjk:

I paid $75 for the 256->512MB RAM upgrade from Apple, figuring I'd have no use for 256MB anyway and that was a fair deal for 512MB. I added a 1GB DIMM from transintl.com on Monday.

Heh .. ditto. It was worth the $75 to have a single 512mb Apple stick (in case 3rd party ram ever goes wonky). My 1gb stick from transintl.com looks like it will be arriving on Monday 5/24 according the UPS tracking site. So, your machine recognizes the ram fine?

Originally posted by sjk:

This system is plenty capable of handling a diversity of tasks with quite adequate speed. Still haven't tried GarageBand and iDVD since I've been busy migrating data from the iBook. Anyway, I'm satisfied with everything so far.

Same here, it seems to have the guts to do some pretty heavy lifting which has been nice. I actually converted/compressed some DVDs I own -- something that'd I never would have even attemped with my DV iMac. My data migration was a breeze since I was anal retentive about keeping the original downloads of programs I liked and used. Also, I'd backed up my Safari favorites, addressbook prefs, etc to my iDisk. Once I synced that stuff back to my machine, it was like I was instantly back to my old environment. All in all, I give this purchase a as well.

[sjk]

Originally posted by Krusty:
You can recalibrate and you will be prompted to save it as a new profile after you are done. You can very simply switch back to the old profile if need.

That's what I needed to know... thanks!

BTW, I switched to the sRGB profile and the monitor is now about as bright as I like/remember. So, that prob is solved for me.

sRGB Profile is a tiny bit less bright than eMac and Generic RGB Profile is sort of "washy" brighter. I'll fiddle with this stuff more when I haven't already been staring at the screen for hours.

I'm running 1152x864. 1280x960 is just a little too low on the refresh for me -- though I may give it a try sometime for a while and see how I like it.

I may try 1152x864 for comparison. One reason I didn't consider a 15" LCD iMac was because 1024x768 was too small after 2.5 years at that res. on my iBook. The eMac was a better deal even tho' I was reluctant to buy a CRT system.

The 62.9 may be an anomaly. Most readings were in the 53-55mb range with this one really high reading.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense when all the other 4K block tests have low values. Btw, highest overall Xbench score I got was 135.58.

They should be louder. They just aren't

I've had mixed results. Some audio's been too loud and some not loud enough. My old Labtecs + "boom" woofer are fine for now.

Good analogy

Thanks.

You don't have to use those separate keys. Experiment with Option + arrow, Command + arrow, etc. You'll find behavior similar to what you were used to with the iBook .

Ahh, similar and subtly different. It's peculiar how they work in Safari depending on where the cursor focus is. For example, if you start using control-up/down while in a text box (like this one) they'll keep working as page-up/down on the entire page. Otherwise they're not active and option-up/down are instead, but they work like paragraph-up/down in a text box. Something funky like that. command-up/down seem more consistently like home/end, unless intercepted by some app (e.g. EyeTV). I'll try a comparison with the iBook later. Thanks much for the tip!

You may never need the Bluetooth, but hey, getting everything internal that you can is important with an all-in-one.

That was my reasoning.

Heh .. ditto. It was worth the $75 to have a single 512mb Apple stick (in case 3rd party ram ever goes wonky). My 1gb stick from transintl.com looks like it will be arriving on Monday 5/24 according the UPS tracking site. So, your machine recognizes the ram fine?

No trouble at all. I was told they use Samsung chips, like Apple (typically?) does. You reminded me that I'd figured it was better temporarily falling back to 512MB in case there was trouble with the 1GB. Or 1GB if the 512MB fails.

Btw, even with 1.5GB the system still creates extra swapfiles in /var/vm. I think I understand why but it's too much explanation for here.

I actually converted/compressed some DVDs I own -- something that'd I never would have even attemped with my DV iMac.

I'm putting off starting video-related projects 'til next week. I haven't done much of it on my iBook so I need undistracted time to get familiar with things. Need to find a good, inexpensive source for DVD media, too.

My data migration was a breeze since I was anal retentive about keeping the original downloads of programs I liked and used.

Same here. I tend to hoard more than I'll ever need, which I realized probably became a habit from years of using slower connections where once something was downloaded I kept it for fear of having to endure doing it again.

Tangent...

My UNIX sysadmin career started long before GUI "configuration management" arrived. I've always liked using a text editor to change config files because that makes it easy to keep a change history and/or backup files (e.g. using RCS). I've quickly found solutions to many problems of various types simply by comparing working configs with a broken ones. My IT nightmare is working in a group where everyone makes config changes (GUI or not) without any record of them. "It worked yesterday. What changed?" I dunno." *sigh*

Anyway, I dreaded the possibility of losing that capability with OS X. Then I had the idea to make screen captures for preserving a visual record of changes made from GUIs. So, I diligently do that with most system/application preference changes. Some of the time I spend doing that is regained when I use it as a reference during app/sys reconfigs. But more importantly it gives me a sense of integrity that I originally thought would be missing when managing OS X with a GUI. No loss of my pedantic sanity.

Also, I'd backed up my Safari favorites, addressbook prefs, etc to my iDisk. Once I synced that stuff back to my machine, it was like I was instantly back to my old environment.

I've ditto-cloned from from my iBook and merge things in as I need 'em. Installing apps from scratch, too, and referring to the screen captures as needed while making prefs changes. With some of the trickier configs I just use the copied prefs files even if I have screen captures.

One major task remains: how to get iTunes to find a couple thousand tracks (saved outside the iTunes music folder) in their new location without losing current Library/Playlist information about them. Question is, if I import them will iTunes create duplicates for everything or somehow match them with existing entries? If necessary, I'll experiment on the iBook.

Whew.

[Krusty]

Originally posted by sjk:
The eMac was a better deal even tho' I was reluctant to buy a CRT system.

I've not yet owned an LCD system - so I decided that I wouldn't know the difference after being "spoiled" by an LCD

Originally posted by sjk:

Btw, even with 1.5GB the system still creates extra swapfiles in /var/vm. I think I understand why but it's too much explanation for here.

oh well, I was hoping to be swap-free for a while.

Originally posted by sjk:

Need to find a good, inexpensive source for DVD media, too.

Let me know if you find one. My specific activities so far have been compressing DVDs down in size to QT movies that will fit on cheap CDRs. Havent done any burning to DVD-R yet either.

Originally posted by sjk:

Same here. I tend to hoard more than I'll ever need, which I realized probably became a habit from years of using slower connections where once something was downloaded I kept it for fear of having to endure doing it again.

Yup

Originally posted by sjk:

One major task remains: how to get iTunes to find a couple thousand tracks (saved outside the iTunes music folder) in their new location without losing current Library/Playlist information about them. Question is, if I import them will iTunes create duplicates for everything or somehow match them with existing entries? If necessary, I'll experiment on the iBook.

I don't have time to try this because I'm goin to work in a few minutes. But, peeking at the iTunes Music Library.xml, it appears that you may be able to just cut and paste everything between the <tracks> nodes (and maybe the <playlist> nodes) into the appropriate spot and then globally search and replace the old external location (from the <key>Location</key><string> node) with the new location where you are keeping them now. Could get hairy if you had multiple external locations but it seems like it should be that straightforward if it's all from one external spot on your iBook to another with your eMac ?? I never bothered because I've killed/reaquired my iTunes library enough times that my info is hopelessly inaccurate anyway

Originally posted by sjk:

Whew.

Indeed !!

[Krusty]

Just a quick update on the disk speed thing. I mistakenly wrote "reads" instead of "writes" when I was talking about the 62+ mb transfer rate. However, I've run Xbench several more times since then and am getting consistent write speeds for uncached 256k blocks of between 62.04 and 62.99. Cool

[sjk]

Originally posted by Krusty:
Let me know if you find one. My specific activities so far have been compressing DVDs down in size to QT movies that will fit on cheap CDRs. Havent done any burning to DVD-R yet either.

Only place I know offhand is Americal.com for bulks purchases, which I bookmarked after seeing it mentioned in iDVD Part 2 (MacInTouch Reader Report). That's over a year ago, tho'. Might be a week or so 'til I have time to research for more up-to-date info re: DVD burning and media. Likely I'll start with DVD-RW and/or DVD+RW rewritable media just to get familiar with things without burning $$ on -R/+Rs.

[iREZ]

150+ is considered really fast
125+is pretty quick
100+the norm for now
75+ehhhhh



You're being a little harsh with lower scoring Macs. My 12" Rev. A Powerbook for instance scores a 78 when I include the disk benchmark and a 97 without it. It is by no means an "ehhh" system despite its low score from the slower laptop hard drive it has. The baseline system all XBench scores are normalized to has a 7200rpm drive with an 8MB buffer. Any lesser hard drive skews your results for the worse.

I still stand by my statement, if you run Xbench without altering any tests ran and score in the 70's, your computer isn't all what you make it cracked up to be. I have a lone Rev B 12" and my comp scores in the 100's and I still consider my computer and ehh machine in terms of speed. Sure your computer can get the job done and I never said it couldn't, but when an iBook, iMac, and eMac can knock your PB in Xbench tests then your computer is in the ehhh range, fully capable but nothing extrodinary. Just my two cents, take it however you wish.

I don't think what I said is outrageous by any means, hopefully I'm not the only one.

[Krusty]

Well just an update (for anyone who might care) --- just added my extra gig of ram for a total of 1.5gb now. Ran Xbench immediately after the restart. Even though my disk test gave the slowest maximum read yet (60.88mb/sec) my overall score weighed in at 136.03.
edit: oh, I think I forgot to mention to sjk, I actually partitioned my drive into a 48.5 gb "main" drive and a 100gb "media" drive. Perhaps that explains the fast hard drive scores I've been getting (if the main partition resides on the faster part of the drive .. I honestly don't know how Disk Utility allocates drive space when you partition)

Also: 44 concurently running apps . Sweet.

[sjk]

Nice dock, Krusty (or Krusetaz, as my German wife says )).

I repartitioned with ~25GB "system" (journaled) and ~125GB "media" (unjournaled) slices. Two partitions is fine for a single-drive system.