<<<I've see the specs. for those 225 Mhz 604e, and I was in shock. It was almost as bad as comparing my Mac IIsi with a PowerMac, the bars just don't show up.
Are there cross platform benchmark applications I can get? Are they non-bias in measuring speed? I'd really like to see how my machine stacks up to a Pentium 100. From what I've see, I think my 7200 can easily beat a similarly equipped Pentium 75.>>>
Well, to answer your first question as to how fast the 240Mhz 603e's are - they are right at 66% the speed of a 604e (meaning the 604e machine runs 50% faster at the same Mhz). For instance, the 240Mhz 603e has a SPECint95 of 6.2 or something like that (it's over 6) whereas the 225Mhz 604e has a SPECint95 of 9.something. On MacBench testing it comes out to right about what I mentioned above (604e's are 50% faster, all else being equal). The 240Mhz 603e should be 2.4x faster than a 100Mhz 601 (since the 603e and 601 are roughly comparable in machines with similar memory architectures, as are found in the 7200/7500 machines vs. the 5400/6400 machines). Other components may be slower in the 603e-based Performas (like the video, which is not going to come close to the 8Mb video cards in the PowerTower Pros). But then again, Power will be releasing the 180Mhz PowerBase machines for about $1500. That's incredible, as this machine will perform about the same speed as a 133Mhz 7600 at CPU-intensive stuff. I don't think it includes a monitor, but still. The price difference between the PowerBase and the new Performas and SuperMacs is way too large...there must be something going on there. And why is UMAX setting it's price points at about the same as the Apple machines (they're slower and cheaper, but per Mhz, they're pretty expensive even relative to Apple's)? That seems pretty ridiculous from a business sense. Once again, Apple seems to be charging way too much for their machines, though it depends on exactly what they come with ($2300 for a 180Mhz/0L2/1.6GHD/16M Ram/8xCd....but does it include a monitor? Pictures I've seen show it with the puny 14" multiscan crap-o-la monitor).
As far as cross-platform benchmarks, try out BYTEmark. I've uploaded it here previously. It compares your machine to a 90Mhz Dell Pentium (Dells are actually pretty fast machines). So, for instance, if your machine comes out to have scores of 1.05, that means you're 5% faster than the 90Mhz pentium at that task. My 7500 generally gets about 50-80% higher than the 90Mhz Dell.
