eMac Back
I have finally gotten my eMac back from repair and it now has a brand new logic board, CRT and voltage board. essentially the only thing that is the same is the casing and speakers! This should mean that I have years of trouble-free computing with this now given that eMacs are very reliable with the exception of the 1.25GHz eMacs blighted with capacitor disease. Apparently mine had three exploded capacitors, i.e. not bulging, not popped but exploded… How the thing still worked is beyond me.
So I now have it running and superficially this feels faster than my old Power Mac Digital Audio used to be. Which was quite beefy, 1.42GHz G4 w/2MB L3, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro etc. So I thought I’d benchmark it as I did with the G4 DA as I did back then.
Here is an XBench 1.3 comparison of PowerMac G4 DA vs. eMac (both mine) – 49pts vs. 53.
The eMac overall comes out slower but I reckon it is utterly skewed by the eMac having a Radeon 9200 vs. the G4 DA’s 9800 Pro; as for everything the eMac feels like the ’sharpest’ Mac I have owned. It certainly beats the PowerBook 12″ I had.
However, whilst neither are cutting edge, food for thought that the PowerMac DA’s lowly PC-133 SDRAM and ATA-66 hard disk interface held up pretty well to the eMac’s DDR-RAM and ATA-100 bus. Achieving high hard disk speeds is not likely on a single controller on a non RAID 0/5 configuration so this is a moot point as a consequence and DDR is slightly wasted on a G4…
On a slightly unrelated note, why has WordPress gone with an ugly colour scheme for their dashboard… Eugh. I’ll be using Windows Live Writer more as a consequence now (when on a Windows machine.)
