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The gracious people at Newer Technology let us play with one of their new PowerPC
750 based MAXpowr 250 cards for about a month. We liked it. We liked it enough to
keep it. So, I thought I would share my experiences with this new card and why someone
on the team kept the card, and why that someone was not me.
When the card first arrived, I didn't have time to install it until later that week.
The reason I waited so long was that I was in the middle of a large project and between
using my Power Mac for this project, updating the Web pages, updating the mailing
list, and keeping up with email, I really wasn't in the mood to pick a fight with
my Mac. I couldn't handle an afternoon tweaking my machine both under the hood and
in the system folder. Finally, after about four days of staring at the card in the
corner I opened up the box and started looking it over.
Out of Box Experience
I was a little brave since I still needed my Mac to compress a load of QuickTime
movies and AIFF files before the weekend. I was thinking that any time I spent working
to getting the card going would be made up with the new speed of a suddenly G3 Power
Mac. The installation of the card was very easy. I've handled daughter cards a number
of times before so it wasn't something new. The manual that came with the card was
very useful. It had instructions for what seems to be every machine the card could
work in; complete with pictures. The software was also easy to install. The card
came with the complete set of Newer Technology's utilities like GURU and the various
gages. Also included were Connectix's Virtual PC and separately RAM Doubler 2.0 and
Speed Doubler 8. In addition to the CD, my card came with a floppy with the latest
driver software on it.
(Note: If you install from the CD, be sure to get the latest and greatest either
on disk for from Newer's web site. Later when I attempted to install the card into
a different machines, I forgot about the floppy and I was left scratching my head
as to why it wasn't working correctly.)
When I rebooted, to my dismay I had a bus error on boot. A grunt later I rebooted
with the extensions off and started to do some cleaning with the extension manager.
On a hunch, I looked into the extensions folder and found a third party extension
used to disable the help button on the keyboard was named with three spaces causing
it to load just before the MAXPowr extension. I renamed the extension to allow the
G3 extension to load first and rebooted. Everything loaded fine. As far I noticed,
only this extension caused problems when loading before the MAXPowr extension.
After I was up and running, I ran some test, and was a little surprised at the results.
The new CPU card made my 8500/180 96MB Mac suddenly twice as fast. Curious, I loaded
up the old Norton System Info and saw something interesting. Norton expectedly did
not know what was in the machine but it clocked the processor at as 400MHz PowerPC
604e. This somewhat confirms the MacBench scores of nearly 200% boost over my 604e/180.
The hardest part of the upgrade was probably finding the CPU reset button. For some
reason I think it wasn't where I thought the manual was telling me. Yeah, it was
faster, but honestly I wasn't too impressed. Perhaps my expectations were a little
high, or the fact that I subscribe to the theory that most Mac users don't need anything
past 200 MHz. Like I said, it was faster, but I felt uneasy about justifying the
$1100 price tag. But, I had a month to play with it, so I wasn't going to give up
on it yet.
Real World Experience
When deciding how to present the performance of the card, I decided against giving
pure numbers from benchmarks. I personally prefer the real world experience. So,
probably like any Mac user testing out speed, I went right for Adobe and Macromedia
products
Like I said, I had a plate full of Quicktime and audio compressions lined up. Now
was the time to take advantage of the G3 processor. The card was in fact faster here,
I to be honest I'm not sure what I would have done without it. I estimated that it
cut my work time in half. After a couple days of use, I began to appreciate the extra
power.
After about a week of use, I did notice something kind of strange. Newer Technology
told me about this, and it seemed a little odd. What I noticed was when I highlighted
text, some of the highlight pixels were missing. Like I said, I didn't notice this
for about a week or so, then it finally caught my eye. Newer Technology acknowledges
the problem and says it's a problem with the card and the Mac's onboard video. Newer
suggests first removing the 7200 graphics accelerator from the systems. I didn't
have it running. They next suggest to upgrade the VRAM to 60 ns DIMMs. I have 4 MB
installed and no idea what their speeds are. The final fix all solution is to install
a third party PCI graphics card. The problem persisted on the second Mac the card
was installed on also. The problem is barely noticeable and I decided it wasn't worth
worrying about. Other than the extension conflict, this is the only problem I had
with this card.
As for Finder speeds, I typically keep everything running at once. For example, when
working on this project I had Photoshop, SoundEdit, Director, and some Quicktime
utilities all going at once. When doing updates for the web page and mailing list,
I typically have Eudora, IE, Visual Page, BBEdit, TexEdit, and maybe a news reader
or Graphic Converter once in a while. Jumping between the apps take its toll on the
machine's performance especially while using the network, and both cases, the G3
card kept up fine. I decided I liked the card, and started asking how I could get
one.
To Upgrade or Not?
Here's the big question. If you've been thinking about upgrading your system or buying
a new Mac, you've got some choices.
First off, if you have a Power Mac with the ability to upgrade via the daughter cards,
the Newer Technology card is a great deal. You have the power of a PowerPC 750 processor
while still using your existing system.
Now, if you are planning to buy a new Mac, I'm a little hesitant towards the new
Apple Power Macintosh G3 systems. Rule of thumb in the industry is to never buy the
first generation of anything. The new Apple G3 systems have some incompatibilities
with various hardware and software. While these problems can and are being fixed,
they're still looming. The important thing to realize here is that these problems
are not with the Power PC 750 processors themselves, but with the new systems from
Apple.
Bottom Line:
So, if you're thinking of buying a new computer, and you don't have a Mac to upgrade
with, perhaps buying an older 604 based PowerMac might be a good way to go. For example,
find a 7300 or even an older 7500 then buy an upgrade card with some RAM and maybe
an extra hard drive. If you're not faint at heart, this could be a way to save some
money and perhaps some headaches with incompatibilities.
Add into the mix the fact that the 604 bases Macs have more DIMM slots and a full
SCSI bus, the older Macs still have quite some punch. The architecture is solid on
these older machines and that shouldn't go out of date for quite some time. For these
reasons, if I were to buy a new computer, I would look to upgrade a past prime Mac
with the of the many G3 upgrade cards.
What I did:
At first I wasn't too impresses with the new G3 card. It was fast, but not worth
sinking $1000+ into my Mac. To me, 180MHz is still fast enough, however once the
G3 card was pulled from my machine, the speed difference was very noticeable. As
the saying goes, I guess you don't know what I've got until it's gone... I will get
a G3 upgrade for my Mac in the near future, however eventually the cards will come
down in price and I don't have a pressing need to have one right now. If you have
a slower Mac and are looking to upgrade, chances are 604e cards in the 200MHz - 250MHz
will probably start coming down in price.
While I was not ready for the upgrade, a member of our team was -- truth was we didn't
want to see the card leave. So, while it might not be in my Mac, I can still play
with it on someone else from time to time.
Compatibility:
Power Macintosh 7300,7500,7600,8500,8600,9500,9600, Power Computing Power Tower Pro,
Power Wave, Umax Super Mac J700, S900.
Software Included:
RAM Doubler 2
Speed Doubler 8
Virtual PC (DOS version)
Motorola LIbMoto
Color It 3.X
SpellTools (registered version)
Gauge Series
GURU
Pros:
• Stable, smooth install, and almost no problems in operation.
• Get G3 power without G3 incompatible problems
• Current Apple G3 systems are not up gradable. Using this card in an older Mac,
future upgrades are possible
• Likely to save money over buying a new system
Cons:
• Some incompatibilities as noted with missing pixels
• Can't take advantage of faster system bus with newer Apple G3 machines
• Can't take advantage of new SDRAM in newer Apple G3 machines
• Users might not really need this much speed for the $1000+ price tag
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