Speedmark , Macworld Lab ’s received trial tool for benchmarking new and elevate systems , has been updated to variation 4.5 . Using a entourage of tangible - universe applications and tasks that everyone — from a power user to a Mac neophyte — performs every solar day , Speedmark aims to give reader an idea of how one Mac range liken to the rest of the product line in terms of mean solar day - to - daylight performance .

Most Speedmark update occur when Apple releases a major overhaul of its operating system . This sentence , however , we want to revamp the test entourage to fit two changes in system computer architecture .

With the introduction of Intel processors to the Mac product job , running many of the tasks included in Speedmark 4 would require Apple ’s Rosetta emulation applied science . Because owners of Intel Macs will be using Rosetta , we left a few of those tests in the new suite . Unfortunately , the performance strike associate with this translation makes the comprehension of too many non - native app tasks in our bench mark suite unjust to these new Intel Macs , so we transfer two of them .

Another modification that Apple made recently was to declare oneself a standard system contour with 1 GB of RAM . to keep a level playing battlefield — and to decimate the want to test each system multiple meter — we’ve resolve to lift the received shape for Speedmark to 1 GB of RAM .

Here is the list of change included in this variant of Speedmark :

With all of these change , its impossible to compare resultant role from previous adaptation of Speedmark with resolution from Speedmark 4.5 . So , we ’ve been busy retesting a bunch of systems with the fresh version of Speedmark .

Here ’s a prominent benchmark chart that we hope will give you a dear musical theme of the performance of currently uncommitted Macs under Speedmark 4.5 .

Mac Systems Compared

Best results inbold .

How we essay : Speedmark 4.5 scores are relative to those of a 1.25GHz Mac miniskirt , which is assigned a score of 100 . Cinema 4D XL , iMovie , iTunes , and Zip Archive scores are in minutes : seconds . All system were run Mac OS X 10.4.5 with 1 GB of RAM , with processor carrying into action set to Highest in the Energy Saver druthers pane when applicable . The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50 M filing cabinet . Photoshop ’s retentivity was put to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum . In iMovie , we applied the Aged video effect to a 1 - minute movie . We converted 45 minute of AAC audio file to MP3 using iTunes ’ High Quality setting . We used Unreal Tournament 2004 ’s Antalus Botmatch average - flesh - per - second score ; we tested at a resolve of 1,024 by 768 pixels at the Maximum setting with both audio and graphics enabled . We created a Zip archive in the Finder from a 1 GB folder.—Macworld science laboratory examination by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung

While Speedmark give an first-class indication of material - mankind performance , it is not our only benchmark . We will go on to produce and include tests in a variety of applications appropriate for the hardware we critique . If you have suggestions for tryout that you ’d like to see bleed by Macworld Lab , countenance us know .