Although not as fast as the internal ATA hard drive, the MacTell FirePower drive ran much faster on the G4/400 built-in FireWire than with an Orange Micro HotLink PCI FireWire card.
In a few days, I'll post more "real world" numbers (like Photoshop CPU and GRAPHICS figures) but here's more MacBench numbers in the meantime:
Conclusion: As my "AltiVec" Photoshop test results show, the G4 has the right stuff. However, none of the above tests engage the "Velocity Engine" in the G4. If you judge the G4/400 on these tests alone, it's only an incremental evolution in the "G" Macs.
FLASH! The ROM "block" has been BROKEN as of 9/27/99!
I received a copy of the ROM patching utility from PowerLogix. I ran it on a Blue & White G3/450 (Mac OS 8.6) which had its ROM updated to 1.1f4.
After installing the patch, I popped in a G4/400 ZIF from a G4/400 Yikes. It booted up no problemo and was running at 450MHz (due to the jumper settings on the Blue & White motherboard).
Just for fun I booted from the second drive which had MacOS 9 installed. Launching Photoshop 5.5 with AltiVecCore activated, I ran the Rotate, Gaussian Blur, and Lighting Effects tests. It screamed!
MORE ON ROM BLOCK BREAKTHROUGH:
PowerLogix has announced 10/1/99 that they have full AltiVec compatibility with the G4 upgrades. When I tested the patch there was a problem with it under Mac OS 8.6 but it worked fine under Mac OS 9. Now it works with both.
"We created a macro with a large range of typical PhotoShop operations and found that on identically equipped machines, a 4 year old PowerMac 7500 with a G4 could virtually match a brand new PowerMac G4," said Marc Reviel, VP of Engineering.
Test Configurations & Procedures