Washington Apple Pi

A Community of Apple iPad, iPhone and Mac Users

Upgrading My Pismo PowerBook: Benchmarking the Result

By Richard A. “Dick” Rucker

Washington Apple Pi Journal, reprint information

My trusty Pismo PowerBook, purchased at a discount after the first generation titanium PowerBook G4s were announced in January, 2001, developed a problem with its hard drive shortly before its AppleCare policy expired. When I got it back from Apple’s repair center, I discovered that Apple had replaced the original Toshiba 9.4 GB, 4200 rpm drive with a Fujitsu 16.9 GB, 4200 drive! Also, though my Pismo had not yet developed a problem with its display, Apple replaced it anyway, presumably because of the high failure rate experienced with displays in some Pismo PowerBooks.

So here I was with a new hard drive and display on a laptop that has served me rather well. I’ve appreciated having the features of the Pismo, even though I haven’t yet used them all. For example, in addition to its two FireWire ports and 2 USB ports, it has a slot for a PCI card as well. It also seems built to take quite a bit of punishment.

Its 400 MHz G3 processor has been adequate for most things, but in Photoshop performance on occasion seemed slow. In GarageBand, some songs failed to play because either the processor or the hard disk was too slow. Both of these programs were designed to take advantage of the G4’s Altivec processor.

I learned of a new upgrade announced for the Pismo by Daystar Technology. The attractive features included:

According to Daystar president Gary Dailey: “We've worked hard to create an upgrade program that provides a competitive reason for people to upgrade, rather than ‘buy new.’ With a PowerBook G5 rumored for late this year or early next, the MAChSpeed G4 Pismo allows a user to get Mac OS X G4 performance today and wait until Apple's next generation laptop is proven.” That rang a bell with me as I had waited to buy a laptop from Apple until the Pismo with its 5-star rating came along, and it will probably be a year or two before a PowerBook G5 becomes a “must have” for me.

So I mailed my Pismo off to Daystar’s facility in Buford, GA, for the upgrade. While they had it open, they also added an Apple Airport Card and 1.0 GB of RAM. I had my Pismo back in hand 3 days later.

Oh yes, Daystar did one other good thing: Upon receiving my Pismo back from the Apple repair facility for the second time — it took Apple two tries to get the new display working properly — I discovered that my Pismo wouldn’t recharge its battery. I noted this problem on a sheet of paper when I shipped it off to Daystar. The next evening, Gary called me on the phone to say that a technician discovered a broken diode and an open solder joint on the sound card. He asked me if I wanted them to fix that as well, and my answer was yes. My Pismo came back working fine and able to re-charge its battery once again.

The order for my upgrade shows these costs, not including the cost of the repair and shipping:

550 MHz MAChSpeed G4 Pismo upgrade: $329
Apple Airport Card: $69
1 GB RAM installed: $250

The upgrade also includes a 2-button, scrolling mouse and XLRI MACh Speed Control utility software. The software provides an overview of the system and its current parameters, information on the processor, and controls for whether thermal monitoring is enabled, whether L2 cache speed is automatically or manually determined, whether power conservation is enabled, and whether write-through is enabled. As I type this, the utility shows:

Processor core: PowerPC G4 7410; 549.0 MHz; 24° C (normal)
Level 1 cache: 32 KB data; 32 KB instructions
Backside (Level 2) cache: 1 MB running at 219.7 MHz
Motherboard Memory: 1024 MB running at 99.9 MHz

For more on this upgrade, see “Daystar MACHSpeed G4 Pismo Upgrade Review” by “road warrior” Charles Moore at: http://www.macopinion.com/columns/roadwarrior/04/02/10/

A Faster Hard Drive is Added

After getting the upgraded Pismo back, I found it worked great and was more responsive than before, pleasing me very much, with one exception: GarageBand. It still complained about my slow hard drive, but Development Depot provided the answer:

IBM-Hitachi 2.5” 60 GB Drive, 7200 RPM: $280
MacAlley 2.5” Enclosure with ports for FireWire & USB-2: $50

The new drive replaced the 4200 rpm drive that Apple installed, and the Apple drive went into the enclosure as an external drive for backup. It was now time to see if I could measure some of the benefits of my upgrades.

Benchmark tests used

Two criteria guided me in my selection:

  1. should be simple to conduct and interpret and
  2. should represent an aspect of performance I care about.

The tests chosen were:

Startup time: This is the elapsed time from power on, through the loading of the OS X 10.3.2 system software and the creation of the desktop, to the end of hard disk activity as a result of startup. I avoided upgrading to OS 10.3.3 until after these benchmark comparisons had been completed.

Copy folder time: A folder containing 560 items totaling 170 megabytes was copied then pasted to the desktop. Measured was the elapsed time between the paste command and when the coping process was completed.

Secure erase time: The folder copied to the desktop was securely erased, meaning that the command Finder > Secure Empty Trash was issued. According to the Help File for Finder, “Files deleted in this way are completely overwritten by meaningless data.” Measured was the elapsed time between clicking on the OK button in the “Are you sure…” dialog and when the overwriting process was completed.

Launch Microsoft Entourage: This is the email client I use regularly, and the time it takes to launch has annoyed me when using it on my G3 Pismo. So if the upgrade helped with this, I would be pleased. Two cases were examined:

  1. How long it took to launch when the Main Identity folder contained only what was put there at installation time or when Entourage was first launched after installation. That Main Identity folder was approximately 400 KB in size.
  2. How long it took to launch when the Main Identity folder on my Pismo was copied from my main machine, a G4 desktop PowerMac. My Main Identity folder was approximately 135 megabytes in size.

Launch Photoshop 7.0 by dropping a 1.3 MB JPEG file on its icon. The time measured was from the time the mouse button was released until the photo file was opened in Photoshop.

Apply Photoshop 7.0 filters to the JPEG file opened above. Each filter was applied in turn using the default parameter values provided by Photoshop. The picture was restored to its original state before the next filter was applied.

Benchmark Test Results

Startup time: G3 Pismo: 2 minutes, 10 seconds. Upgrading to a G4 didn’t change that, but putting in a faster hard drive did. With the new hard drive, the G4 Pismo now boots in 1 minute flat.

Copy folder time: G3 Pismo: 1 minute to copy. Upgrading to a G4 didn’t change that, but putting in a faster hard drive did. With the new hard drive, the G4 Pismo copied that folder and its contents in 15 seconds, 4x faster. Why four times, when the ratio of the disk drive rpm is 7200 /4200 = 1.7 times faster? I don’t know.

Secure erase time: G3 Pismo: 10 minutes to erase. Upgrading to a G4 didn’t change that, but putting in a faster hard drive did. With the new hard drive, the G4 Pismo erased that folder and its contents in 5 minutes, 25 seconds; i.e., 2x faster.

Launch Microsoft Entourage: G3 Pismo: 30 seconds with default Main Identity folder. The G4 Pismo takes only 4 seconds to launch with the default folder, regardless of the speed of the hard drive; i.e., 7.5 times faster.

With my much larger Main Identity folder, the G3 Pismo took 30 seconds, while the G4 Pismo with the slower drive took 18 seconds. The G4 Pismo with the faster drive took 16 seconds.

Launch Photoshop 7.0: G3 Pismo: 52 seconds. The G4 Pismo with the slower drive took 22 seconds. The G4 Pismo with the faster drive took 14 seconds.

Time to apply Photoshop 7.0 filters (seconds):

submenu > filter name

G3,
slower drive
G4,
slower drive
G4,
faster drive


Artistic > Colored Pencil

54 16 16

Artistic > Water Color

47 12 12

Pixelate > Pointillize

15 15 10

Render > Lens Flare

05 03 03

As expected, the upgrade to the G4’s Altivec parallel processor significantly reduced the amount of time required for three of the four filters applied. I have no explanation for why the “Pointillize” filter benefited from the faster drive, but not from Altivec. If anyone has an explanation, a letter to the Editor would be appreciated. (Operator error perhaps?)

Tests of Pismo with Garageband songs: Two folders of projects, or “songs,” created in Garageband come with the application; one contains “G3 projects” and the other contains “G4-G5 projects.” Since my goal was to stress the Pismo before and after the upgrades, I tested with the five songs in the latter folder.

A crude measure of the load imposed on the computer by each song is simply the number of sound tracks each song contains. For example, the song file “Glide.band” contains:

Real Instrument tracks:
drum kit, shaker, acoustic guitar, clean guitar, electric slide guitar, guitar licks
Software Instrument tracks:
electric bass, conga, Hollywood strings

In the order of the number of tracks they contain, the songs tried are:

Shufflin’_Piano_Blues: 5 tracks
Daydream: 8 tracks
Meadowland: 8 tracks
Glide: 9 tracks
Reflection: 12 tracks

G3 Pismo:

Shufflin’_Piano_Blues: play-head movement jerky; stopped mid-play with the error message “Disk too slow or system overload.”

Daydream: play-head movement jerky; stopped mid-play with the error message “Hard disk not fast enough to deliver all audio data in time…”

Meadowland, Reflection: stopped before playing anything with the error message “System overload. The song exceeds the processing power of your computer…”

Glide: interestingly, it played to completion without an error message, but the movement of the play-head was jerky.

G4 Pismo with 4200 rpm hard drive:

Shufflin’_Piano_Blues, Daydream, Glide: no error messages; relatively smooth movement of the play-head.

Meadowland: stopped mid-play with the error message “Hard disk not fast enough to deliver all audio data in time…”

Reflection: Stopped mid-play with the error message “System overload. The song exceeds the processing power of your computer…”

G4 Pismo with 7200 rpm hard drive:

Shufflin’_Piano_Blues, Daydream, Glide, Meadowland: no error messages; relatively smooth movement of the play-head.

Reflection: Stopped mid-play with the error message “System overload. The song exceeds the processing power of your computer…”

Conclusions

So far, I’m happy with the upgrades, but I haven’t yet had enough experience with my “new Pismo” to say more right now. Anyone using Garageband with lots of tracks is going to want a 1 GHz processor or better, but for me that can wait.