Conclusion: The Orion board gives a 13 to 17% average speed increase to graphics on a Blue & White G3.

• I had heard that the Orion was faster than the RAGE 128 board that is shipped on a Rev. A Yosemite. So I shoved it in the 66MHz PCI slot to see if it was true. I haven't tested this myself but I understand the "speed bump" Rev B Yosemites have a RAGE 128 that matches the speed of Orion. Keep in mind that the Orion may not be an appropriate replacement board, especially if you have a DVD-ROM. I believe the Nexus 128 might be, though.
• Here's the speed gain by test and cpu clock speed:
  The G3/400/200 was 13% faster overall with the Orion
  The G3/400/266 was 16% faster overall with the Orion
  The G3/500/250 was 17% faster overall with the Orion
• Don't forget to check out what this Orion does for an old Power Mac 7500 with a G3 upgrade.

• The test bed was a Rev A. "Yosemite" B&W G3/350 with 256M of RAM and a PowerLogix G3 PowerForce ZIF 466MHz upgrade.
• The MacBench 5.0 suite from Ziff-Davis was used. It's one of the few benchmark applications that closely simulates "real world" usage. You need the CD-ROM to run the Graphics tests. It only costs $5 to order.
• 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 ON for my test but you might want to consider turning it off. When I turned it off, the scrolling speed increased by 75% on average.)
• Adobe Photoshop scrolling test was run using 4.0.1 DEMO (120MB App size), a 30MB test document, and a stop watch. Results were rounded to the nearest half second. The scroll test was done at 400% zoom; scroll arrow held down while scrolling from top to bottom
• The Unreal 3D 2.2.4b2 test used was the Castle Flyby that comes up at startup. I turned on all the bells and whistles to get high quality graphics. The new version of Unreal doesn't need the Timedemo.u file in the System Folder any longer. To get the average frames per second, you press "~" and enter "timedemo 1". Then press "~" to open up the full screen again. What's cool is that it restarts the flyby at the castle entrance. To turn the frame rate display off, you enter "timedemo 0."
• Quake "frames per second" ratings were obtained by starting up the game, pressing the "~" key, then entering "TIMEDEMO DEMO1" followed by RETURN and another "~" once the demo started. The average frame rate is displayed at the bottom of the screen at the end of the demo. Monitor and Game Resolution was set to 640 x 480. Options were set to Flames ON, Filtering ON, Shadows ON, Skip Lines OFF, Double Pixels OFF.

Many thanks to:

ATI Technology for the use of the Orion RAGE 128

PowerLogix for the use of the G3 PowerForce ZIF upgrade

Consult Deal Mac for lowest prices on the RAGE 128 boards (and PowerLogix ZIF upgrades). One of my favorite sources is MacGurus -- they specialize in upgrades for cpu, graphics and hard drives.

If you want your own copy of MacBench 5.0 , the CD-ROM costs $5 to order from Ziff-Davis.

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© 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
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