The new PowerBook 17: Icing on the PowerBook cake?

By Ken Mingis

June 17, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - OK, PowerBook fans, here's a puzzler for you. I recently had a chance to evaluate two Apple Computer Inc. 17-in. PowerBooks. One came from the factory with a 5,400-rpm hard drive and 128MB of video RAM, build-to-order options that added $100 to the base price of $2,799. I added 1GB of RAM, for 1.5GB total. Sweet machine, right?
The second machine came from Apple with the standard 4,200-rpm hard drive, 512MB of RAM and the stock 64MB of video RAM. When you order the basic 17-in. PowerBook model, this is what you get. (Both come with 802.11g-based AirPort wireless cards and a 4X SuperDrive for burning CDs and DVDs.)
Curious as to what kind of performance difference the build-to-order additions would make, I promptly ran the Xbench benchmarking program to see how much faster PowerBook A would be than PowerBook B. Surprise! PowerBook B -- the cheaper, "slower" one -- got slightly better numbers. PowerBook A clocked in with an Xbench score of 125; PowerBook B reported a score of 129. And no, the extra memory I had added to PowerBook A made no difference. The Xbench scores were the same whether it was installed or not.
I should note that there are more benchmarks at barefeats.com that indicate the hard drive does indeed make a difference in speed.
Now, admittedly, I didn't really expect extra video RAM to make a huge difference in the real or perceived speed of Apple's newest PowerBooks. But for $50 more, I figured it made sense to try to future-proof the new machine as much as possible. The same was true of the faster hard drive. For $50, you move from the stock 80GB hard drive to a 5,400-rpm model with the same capacity. A little speed bump for $100 seems wholly reasonable.


The 17-inch Powerbooks: Fast and faster

With that in mind, I checked the breakdown of Xbench results by component, and they showed virtually no difference between the two hard drives in terms of read/write speed. And on the Quartz graphics test, the OpenGL graphics test and the user-interface test, PowerBook B reported better scores, even though it had half the video RAM.
Want to add insult to injury? The stock PowerBook was a loaner for review purposes, and it went back this week to Apple. I get to keep the slowpoke, which I bought for myself after being duly impressed with the third iteration of Apple's top-of-the-line widescreen laptop.
Actually, calling my new PowerBook a slowpoke isn't fair (see important update below).

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