XLR8's NEW Dual G4/500 ZIF upgrade breathes new life into Beige G3 MiniTowers & Desktops! Early Results Posted: March 20th, 2001 by rob ART morgan, mad Mac scientist It's called the "MACh Velocity." And it ROCKS!         PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS Even with slower memory speeds and slower bus speeds, the Beige MT with the MACh Velocity Dual G4/500 performs surprisingly close to that of a "contemporary" Dual G4/500 Power Mac when doing "serious" CPU functions. (I'll be adding some results from FINAL CUT and AFTER EFFECTS later this week.) When playing Quake3Arena, the MACh Velocity ran just as fast as the other machines with PCI graphics cards. (Though the Unreal Tournament graph isn't posted, the same thing is true.) Now, I did upgrade the graphics card and the hard drive. I wanted to see if a comparably equipped Beige Box could compete with the current crop of Macs. If the MACh Velocity was going to fall short, I wanted it to be because the CPU was deficient, not the graphics chip or hard drive was sluggish. Besides, if you are serious about upgrading your existing machine, you really should upgrade all the subsystems. I was also impressed with the stability of the upgrade even with the beta software. What about the Blue 'n' White? The same upgrade is being prepared to run on it so stay tuned. Ditto for the 7500 thru 9600 series. Again, stay tuned.   COST ANALYSIS That's a toughie. It's easy to say, "Don't spend hundreds on a old Mac. Sell it and buy the newest model." But there are several reasons to give serious consideration to the MACh Velocity dual G4 upgrade (and Radeon card and faster hard drive): You may have a large investment in SCSI, ADB, LocalTalk, and serial devices. You may have a large investment in special analog video capture boards that don't work in newer Macs. You may have maxed out the memory when RAM was expensive. (You'll have to try selling it at today's prices and replace it all with faster memory.) Selling your old Beige Box at a loss is too painful. (You could be still paying for it.) Selling your old Beige Box is a hassle. ("What's a news server? And what is it worth?") Your company will approve upgrades but not a new computer purchase. You're afraid of trading a reliable machine for a potentially flaky one or an outright lemon.   OTHER SITES REPORTING TEST RESULTS Mike Breeden (XLR8YourMac) posted his results for the MACh Velocity.   TEST NOTES TEST HARDWARE G3/266 Beige MT (256M of RAM, ATI Radeon PCI 2D/3D accelerator, VST UltraTek/66 controller, IBM 75GXP 46GB drive, Mac OS 9.1) G3/266 Beige MT (above configuration) with Dual G4/500 XLR8 MACh Velocity G4 MPe 66 upgrade G3/266 Beige MT (above configuration) with PowerLogix G3/500 ZIF upgrade The above configurations were compared to: Single G4/500 Power Mac Single G4/533 Power Mac Dual G4/500 Power Mac Dual G4/533 Power Mac (The four above were configured with Mac OS 9.1, 256M of RAM, and either a ATI Radeon PCI, ATI Radeon AGP and/or nVIDIA GeForce2MX graphics card.)   WHERE TO BUY It's available from XLR8's Online Store as well as from: Other World Computing (search on "xlr8") MacGurus (See my HOT DEALS page for other good sources for this and other upgrade products.) © 1995-2007 Rob Art Morgan "BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS" Email Rob-ART , the webmaster

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