Tiger Boot Times: Quicksilver vs 8600

[tevion5]

Having successfully installed Mac OS X 10.4.11 on my 8600/250 (as detailed here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/604ev-tiger-and-geekbench.1962898/), I thought it would be fun to compare the speeds at which my 1GHz DP Quicksilver and 250MHz 8600 boot the OS.

They have the exact same OS, as the 8600 drive is a clone of my Quicksilver so it's totally fair. The slower buses are the biggest downside to the 8600 of course. And of course the enormous difference in CPU power. 840 vs 95 in Geekbench 2!

However, in terms of HDD's and GPU's and RAM, they are actually fairly equal. At least on the surface. Again those buses and differing memory speeds are a massive factor. Anyway enjoy the little video I made comparing the two!

 

[bunnspecial]

Very nice.

Yours booted a fair bit faster than either my 8600 or 9600, although no doubt your 1gb of RAM(I need to just bit the bullet on that...) help a lot as well as your faster clock speed vs. both of mine(200mhz).

On the GPU front, I'm guessing you're probably running a 4MX or Radeon 9000 in your Quicksilver since you say they're comparable(I think my dual 1ghz shipped with a 4mx, although needless to say I'm no longer using it ). Although the 9200 in your 8600 is the more powerful GPU of the bunch, bear in mind that it's limited by the PCI bus and you're pushing a decent amount through it with the ATA card and the 9200. Although the 9200 supports Quartz Extreme, it's disabled by default on PCI. There are ways to enable it(@LightBulbFun may have talked you through it) and it does help OS X a lot. The downside, of course, is even more throughput on the PCI bus.

As much as I love my 8600 and plan on running Leopard on it(with the 800/1mb G4 card), you get a definite advantage in this department with the 9600. Specifically, because the 9600 has two separate PCI buses, you put the GPU on one bus, your ATA card on the other, and spread out some of your other, lower bandwidth expansion cards(like the USB/Firewire card and the 10/100 or 10/100/1000 card we all want to keep things more manageable) and not have to worry as much about congestion.