New iMacs post modest gains over predecessors (benchmarks)

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

Apple's new 24-inch iMac taps a faster Intel Core 2 Duo processor and front-side bus to post modest speed gains over its predecessors, a series of Geekbench benchmark tests has revealed.

Primate Labs recently pit the new 2.4Ghz 24-inch iMac against previous generation 2.33GHz and 2.16GHz 24-inch systems, each of which was running Mac OS X 10.4.10 with 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

The new 24-inch iMacs sport two major advantages over the older 24-inch iMacs; they have faster processors, and they use the new Santa Rosa chipset (instead of the Napa chipset used in the older 24-inch iMacs).

After running a set of Geekbench tests on the three systems, Primate Labs reports that the new iMac's faster processor helps increase both integer and floating point performance, while its faster front-side bus on the Santa Rosa chipset helps increase memory and stream performance.

"So if you?re running memory-intensive applications (like Aperture or Photoshop) you?ll certainly notice an increase in performance with the new 24-inch iMac," the firm wrote. "Heck, the fact that the new 24-inch iMac supports 4GB of RAM while the old 24-inch iMac supports 3GB of RAM might be enough to convince you to get one."

In reporting the benchmark scores for the systems, Primate opted to use the baseline score, rather than the raw score. The results follow:

Originally Posted by cygnusrk727

I don't think there was any question that the new iMacs would be faster than the old ones. The gripes seem to be that Apple bumped them as little as they possibly could and could have gone farther.

Originally Posted by Thataboy

OMG who cares. Obviously a slightly faster version of the same processor will be slightly better.

Why doesn't someone test out the Core 2 EXTREME iMac???

Originally Posted by Abster2core

Love to hear how you would do it and still price it $200 lower than previously.

And supply references to "the gripes."