"She's my little deuce coupe.
You don't know what I got."

(Hopped up Power Mac 7500 surprises a G4/400 Yikes!)
Posted 10/1/99
© 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
rob-art@barefeats.com

 

My old Power Mac 7500 has been modified more times than a deuce coupe. I couldn't resist trying to tweak it just once more to try running with the new, hot G4's. I had to cheat a little this time, though. I'll tell you how after I amaze you with the results:

 

Now, these next two charts show what the Velocity Engine does on the Yikes:

 

Conclusion: The 7500/G3 "deuce coupe" won 6 out of the 10 "races" and was a close second in the rest (with AltiVec disabled).

Comments: Okay, I cheated. I ran a highly modified 7500 against a "stock" G4/400. The 7500 had a ProFormance3 graphics accelerator (instead of a RAGE 128 board like the Yikes), 3:2 cache ratio (instead of 2:1), MathLibMoto, and a faster IDE hard drive.

But the Yikes has its own advantages: 100MHz bus (versus 50MHz), 66MHz PCI slot (versus 33MHz), fast memory (8ns vs 60ns), G4 (vs G3), etc.

The bottom line is that if you love your old PCI Power Mac too much to let it go, you can squeeze some impressive speed out of it. Just wait until I get a G4 upgrade and an Evil Eye Voodoo3 board!

Of course, nostalgia costs you. These upgrades to the 7500 are not cheap. If you added all the mods I used, it would cost you over $1200... most of the cash you need for a G4/400 Yikes!

 

Test Configurations & Procedures

	Yikes	Deuce Coupe
CPU	G4/400	XLR8 CarrierZIF with PowerLogix G3/466 running at 400MHz
Cache	1 MB at 2:1	1MB at 3:2
RAM	256 MB	160 MB
Graphics	(ATI) RAGE 128 rev 2	Formac ProFormance3
Disk	WDC 10G Caviar 5400rpm connected to an ATA/33 interface	WDC 18G Expert 7200rpm with a TurboMax PCI ATA/33 card

• Although I am repelled by most benchmarking programs, MacBench 5.0 is one of the few that closely simulates "real world" usage. You need the CD-ROM to run the Graphics tests. It only costs $5 to order.
• Unreal 3D test used the Castle Flyby that comes up at startup. To get the average and minimum frames per second with version 2.x.x of Unreal, you press "~" and enter "TIMEDEMO 1." Then press "~" to open up the full screen again. It begins the fly sequence at the castle entrance. (Get the latest latest UNREAL Beta from Westlake's Site.)
• For the WordPerfect 3.5.3 scrolling test, I created a 120 page document containing the sentence "The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dogs" repeated over and over in paragraphs of 8 sentences each in 14 point Times font. Using a stopwatch, I timed how long it took to scroll from the beginning to the end of the document while holding the mouse button down with cursor over the scrolling arrow. (Font smoothing was turned off. If it's on, it will take you 50% longer to scroll through a document!)
• Photoshop 5.5 was given 123MB of application size. The test file was a 17 MB Photoshop document. To get the full AltiVec boost to kick in with Photoshop 5.5, three things need to be true of Photoshop. (See the READ ME file in the Adobe folder in the Apple Extras folder.)
  1. The AltiVec version of LightingEffects must be in the Filters folder in the Plug-ins folder. (This will NOT happen automatically when Photoshop 5.5 is installed.I saved the "old" LightingEffects plug-in so I could "turn off" AltiVec when I wanted.)
  2. The AltiVecCore Plug-in must be in the Adobe folder in the System folder and an alias must be present in the Adobe Photoshop Only folder in the Plug-ins folder. (This WILL happen automatically when Photoshop 5.5 is installed on a G4 system. To turn it OFF, just remove the alias from the Photoshop folder.)
  3. The "~" must be removed from the "~ Enable Async I/O" folder in the Extensions folder in the Plug-ins folder. (This will NOT happen automatically.)

BIG MAHALO TO....

PowerLogix for the use of the G3/466MHz ZIF upgrade

MacGurus for the use of the XLR8 CarrierZIF

Formac for the use of the ProFormance3 graphics card

CompUSA for the use of the Western Data Expert drive

ProMax for the use of the TurboMax ATA/33 PCI card