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PURPLE POWER |
| To help you to decide which upgrade you need, go to this handy chart. |
24th Feb '99 The Sonnet G3 300/1MB L2 upgrade - buy here
We have sold over fifty different flavors of CPU cards over the past two years. Some of them are about as thrilling to sell as watching grass grow. Others are a marriage made in heaven, a perfect match of price and performance. The Vimage 233MHz in a Powerbook 1400 was one of those upgrades right from the gitgo. It provided all the power someone with a 64MB machine might ever need at a price well worth tossing into the machine. And we also love the 400MHz ZIF upgrades for the Apple G3s despite the fact that initially getting people to actually buy them, was like pulling teeth. At one time Barb had to dust the boxes before we shipped them ;) |
PURPLE POWER
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A couple of weeks ago Sonnet sent us their new 240MHz L2 upgrade for the 5400, 5500, 6360, 6400, 6500 and 20th Anniversary Mac. It was a nifty little number but of course we were disappointed not to have gotten the 300MHz/1MB version which we and the customers have been salivating over since MacWorld in January. Since we had tested our first Vimage 240MHz half meg card way back in October we knew what to expect, and the Sonnet card matched the Vimage equivalent. But at 75 percent of the price, it's been a steady little seller over the last ten days. Then Fedex showed up with the Big One, the 300MHz card with the full 1MB of backside cache and we popped it into our machine. And Sonnet has hit a home run with this upgrade, by every measure. There are technical constraints on CPU cards which remain invisible to most customers, as they should. When Newer came out with their 1400 250MHz with 1MB of cache last May, we dropped one in our 1400 for testing. While we loved the low-end 216MHz upgrade for the 1400, the mere use of a 1MB cache turned the upgrade into an unbridled monster. Customers shipped them back like hot cakes. That sucker gobbled batteries like candy and you could literally fry an egg on the heat sink. So we were dead eager to see what would happen with the addition of more cache to the Sonnet L2 cache-card upgrade, an upgrade already constrained by the tiny amount of space available in the computer. We tested and reported on the Sonnet 240/512k L2 upgrade a couple of weeks ago. It offers great performance at a low price for those who don't have big speed needs or who have to count their pennies. And the temperature stayed low. But we were dying to know how hot the 300MHz L2 upgrade ran. If you double cache size and increase the number of cycles per second, for any given chip, you automatically increase heat. The Sonnet 240MHz 512k card ran at a cool 63-degrees centigrade, well within the limits of any machine you can fit it in. Much to our surprise the Sonnet 300MHz/1MB ran cooler. Much cooler. Like 40-degrees C. Almost at ambient room temperature. That's quite impossible. If you increase MHz and double cache size, you must increase heat. The little bugger is not only thinking faster, it's thinking harder. So we asked Sonnet if they had slipped in one of those new copper-based chips from IBM. The copper used for wiring reduces impedance (friction for the non-geeks) and smaller chip size means lower power consumption and less heat. I could hear our rep breathing hard over the phone as he stared at the ceiling. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. He just asked me if I knew how many holes he had in his ceiling. Regardless of what Sonnet says or doesn't say, this is a copper chip running at 300MHz with a full meg of cache. It's fast. Think of it as a Porsche. It may not have the speed of a Ferrari but it doesn't carry a Ferrari cost, either. And it's flipping cool. |
We're now shipping the 300/1MBs (you can read what our customers say about them). We always figured a CPU upgrade lengthens the life of a machine by two years. So the price varies from about 55¢ a day for the 240MHz to 82¢ a day for the 300MHz 1MB. We are about at the point you can upgrade a machine for not much more than the cost of electricity required to feed the beast. If you don't think your time (the biggest expense of every computer system) is worth 55¢ a day, then either you don't value your time or you aren't using your computer to do anything with any value.
Installation takes maybe 5 minutes for klutzes like me or two minutes for those less physically and morally challanged (and who can't spell;) And watch that baby fly. |
LOOK - both memory slots can be used with the Sonnet upgrades You can order/buy here |
MacCPU Y2K/Millennium Countdown Clock for Macintosh
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