On an overclocked 6500...

4 posts / 0 new
Last post
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 6 months ago
Joined: Dec 26 2003 - 16:21
Posts: 584
On an overclocked 6500...

Well this issue is totally out of date, but I jusr remembered it and thought I might ask anyhow...

Here's the thing. Remember my PowerMac 6500, overclocked from 225 to 300MHz and with the black/white flame paint job? That runs slower- by FAR- than a Power Macintosh 7300/200. Now here's the odd part. The 7300 has no cache, an older 2GB hard drive(vs 3GB in 6500), the exact same amount of RAM(modules are interchanged depenging on what computer is being used), the same OS- 9.1, same VM settings, well basically the hard drive is an exact copy of the 6500's hard drive, only smaller- all contents and settings are the same, and the 7300 has lame integrated graphics vs the 6500's Rage II+ chip. Oh, yeah, 100MHZ CLOCK SPEED DIFFERENCE.

What's the deal? Is there something about the 7300 I'm missing?? I don't care WHAT processors they're using, 100MHz and what I think is a 10MHz bus difference has to at LEAST make them equal, but the 7300 blows the 6500 out of the water.

To elaborate, we're talking GUI responsiveness, startup times, Web speed(on the same 33.6k modem), multitask ability, general 2D rendering savviness...

Eudimorphodon's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 3 weeks ago
Joined: Dec 21 2003 - 14:14
Posts: 1207
Re: On an overclocked 6500...

What's the deal? Is there something about the 7300 I'm missing?? I don't care WHAT processors they're using, 100MHz and what I think is a 10MHz bus difference has to at LEAST make them equal, but the 7300 blows the 6500 out of the water.

Try comparing a 486/100Mhz to a 75Mhz Pentium sometime. Or a 1.4Ghz Athlon to a 2Ghz Pentium 4. A better CPU architecture can easily trump a substantial clock speed advantage. Of course, in integer performance the 603e isn't *much* slower per clock then the 604, but... in FPU performance the 604 is almost twice as fast.

Anyway, I'd guess a lot of the startup time difference is due to the hard disk controllers. In theory the PIO Mode 4 supported by the 6500 should be faster then the 10MB/s internal SCSI of the 7300, but in practice the poorly designed IDE controller Apple used sucks a *lot* of CPU, and still manages to perform badly.

--Peace

Offline
Last seen: 15 hours 21 min ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 570
MHz only works well to measur

MHz only works well to measure speed in machines that use the same processor. Unfortunately it makes a 300MHz 603 sound faster than a 200MHz 604. In this case the 604 does twice as much every clock cycle. It might be interesting to see if a 150MHz 604 is faster than a 300mhz 603.
Your machines were sold at the same time and the 6500 nwas an educational or entry level machine while the 7300 was amuch higher end machine,
You might find it interesting to use a testing program like Speedometer to compare systems.

Wayne

Offline
Last seen: 17 years 6 months ago
Joined: Dec 26 2003 - 16:21
Posts: 584
well

I think I have Speedometer somewhere... I may just do that- but it's blindingly obvious already which machine is faster. I may as well just swipe the 6500 back from my friend and pop the processor back down to 225MHz... it's just not worth it burning up prematurely if its still a slow dog of a thing...

Log in or register to post comments