"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

 

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

 

  

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© 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
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