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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
, the webmaster
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