Strange Xbench results

[colinet]

Got some weird results here on my Dual G5 - 2 gig ram

OSX 10.2.8 - Xbench was 185.25

Upgraded to 10.3 and got an improvement to - 202.54

So far so good. Then for no sensible reason (except to get rid of all the extra languafe and printers I'd missed the option of losing the first time) I did a reformat and a clean install of 10.3 and the Xbench reading went DOWN to less than 10.2.8 - 184.4

Any comments. I think I'll restore 10.2.8 and therun the upgrade again.

 

[bousozoku]

You should probably wait a week until Panther has settled. There may be some extra processes running unseen that are affecting the results.

Then again, it could be typical Xbench bugginess.

 

[Powerbook G5]

I've done two clean installs of Panther and both times I've gotten a consistent 120-ish range on XBench for my PowerBook. I think between Panther needing a few bugs ironed out and the G5s in general having really erratic benchmarks overall, it will take some time before we see more consistent scores for the PowerMacs.

 

[GeeYouEye]

I don't trust XBench. As has been pointed out before, simply running it three times can give variances of up to 30%.

 

[Powerbook G5]

Yeah, it seems fishy. I ran Xbench on the iBook G4, the 2 GHz G5, and the old 17" PowerBook, the first two under Panther and the PowerBook under Jaguar. The iBook scored 89.2, the G5 scored 297, and the 17" PowerBook scored 71.3. The iBook was 200 MHz slower than the PowerBook, had half the video RAM, and half the memory, but it blew the PowerBook away (not sure if Jaguar made a huge difference). I expected the G5 to score high since it was a monster and the floor model had 2 gigs of RAM on it.

The Apple tech at CompUSA was awesome, he knew a lot of Apple rumors, a lot of the technical specs of the 7457 vs the 7455, and the 970. He was trying to get this couple to buy a 15" PowerBook and the new iBook G4 for his wife and he was pretty up on the specs. When he left I started giving them the rundown on the machines, told them how cool it was, then told him to go to Apple.com since he told me he was a government employee and told him about the $20 upgrade for Panther or to just use the recovery disc for the iBook if he gets the iBook for his wife. It was pretty cool, first time I really saw people switch to the Mac and he was really thankful I told him about the discounts for the PowerBook online.