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The Ultimate PURPLE POWER from Sonnet 400MHz G3 - you can buy here
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...dead proud to
be the owner of the fastest and most beautiful-looking telly in the world
:) No - we put back the 300/1MB because our TAM is not a working machine, and we just don't need the speed. My daughter surfs on it when she's in USA and we listen to CDs on it. Be content with what you have, unless you are either rich or earn $50plus-an-hour on it and do magic things with Photoshop, then it could be justified. Having said that, I sold one to a young lady this AM who
has the TAM in her bedroom to watch tv. And she also sets it to wake her
up instead of an alarm clock. She bought a 400, despite the fact that she
would get no benefit from the upgrade whatsoever, because money was not
a problem and she's dead proud to be the owner of the fastest and most beautiful-looking
telly in the world. |
March 18th 1999 It is MacCPU's second anniversary on the www this month and we needed something special to celebrate, like an extra-fast upgrade for the TAM. And it occurred to me that if Sonnet could use a 300MHz copper chip in the upgrade, not a lot of engineering would have to be done to use a 400MHz. I asked our rep if Sonnet had plans for a 400MHz cache-slot upgrade. He responded that they didn't for the moment but they certainly could make them. So we said "let's dance..." and they made up a test unit for us. We stuck it in our TAM just to make sure it worked and that it was fast. |
We immediately whipped it out of our machine and sent it to three highly-motivated, speed demon customers, who had bought the 300/1MB last month, for real world testing. (They were the folks who drooled the most over the phone when we mentioned G3 400MHz). These are the ultimate G3 upgrades for the 5500, 6500 and TAM. All machines with a 50MHz bus. The G3 chip can only be clocked to a multiple of eight times bus speed so this is probably it for the next year for these machines. The G4 will be out in 6-8 months and will run faster but no doubt it will cost a bomb at first. So Sonnet did a special Anniversary build for us and if you want the ultimate in G3 performance, grab one while you can, and you can be the fastest guy on the block for a long, long time. We have only a limited supply and we will be shipping out orders on Saturday 20th March. |
From Ryan McDonough of Pliant Solutions Inc, who bought a 300/1MB from us last month and wondered just what benefits he'd get from the faster card (he was stunned, and it's the card for him). The table below doesn't mean much to me, but I know it will to quite a few of you, and he ended up ordering the 400. Here are Ryan's revamped Caffine Marks for Benchmarking Java: |
| Caffine Mark 3.0 with MRJ 2.1 | ||
| 225Mhz 603ev | Sonnet 300Mhz/1MB G3 | Sonnet 400Mhz/1MB G3 |
| 1126 | 4060 | 5567 |
| . I haven't yet timed Real Video compression with the 300Mhz card but here's what I got for the 400Mhz: Compressing the StarWars Trailer for Real Player G2 at a 56k Data-rate: | ||
| size | Time Length | Compression Time |
| 240 x 120 | 2.28 Min | 5.22 Min |
| 320 x 144 | 2.28 Min | 8.02 Min |
From Bob Cleary, a fabulous artist "Its 11.45 and I just received the 400 marked confidential, I have the blinds drawn, the dog in front and the phone off the hook, the door is bolted, I'm going to eat lunch if the excitment doesn't kill me, talk to you in a while." (Bob had a 6500/225 and bought the 300/1MB Sonnet card and got unbelievable results in his Bryce 3D rendering with the 300/1MB. Although the 400MHz upgrade cut his rendering time by a further 33 percent, he is very happy with his 300/1MB). |
| Render time on a 9.4MB file Bryce 3D. | ||
| 6500/225 128MB RAM | Sonnet 300/1MB | Sonnet 400MHz |
| 'almost 2 hrs' | 17mins:00 | 11mins:10secs |
| Bob sent us some interesting numbers. Identical files were rendered on different platforms. |
System |
OS |
CPU speed |
RAM |
RENDER TIME |
Bob's 6500/225 |
|
400MHZ |
128MB |
19:00 |
Dell Dimension XPS 400R |
|
PII 400Mhz |
128MB |
19:02 |
Hewlett Packard 8380 Pavilion |
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PII 400 |
192MB |
19:39 |
From Ron Courtois who also bought a 300/1MB from us last month for his TAM. "Yeeeehaaaa! Uh,er... excuse me... this certainly represents a moderate improvement in speed and performance. Initial impressions are that this is a worth while investment if you work on the net or with graphics/large excel tables. Based on running one of those blue blobs (iMacs) next to this 'Bang and Olufsen' like machine, the 400MHz unit is noticably faster. More to come... ...Everything loaded fine and I launched Metronome, which showed an initial temp of 39c, eventually levelling off at 47c. I opened several Excel workbooks that are 1M to 2M in size. It opened these very quickly. I was more impressed upon making some changes to one or two cells, as doing this with the old 603e/250MHz cpu would take 1 or 2 seconds to ripple through all the tied in pages. It was almost simultaneous. However, this did not show much improvement over the 300MHz upgrade, as that one is equally fast. Running the same test on the iMac produced similar results. comparing all three, the 400MHz upgrade had the Zippiness we used to describe when first using the iMac. It may be psychological, but it FEELS faster. On to Powerpoint. Here I did see a difference. I have a 4.5M PowerPoint presentation that is in an older version of PowerPoint. Opening this up would require the machine to update and load the file. I timed the 400MHz unit at 15-16 seconds, with both the iMac and 300MHz unit at about 18. I moved to the net. I spend about 4 hours per day on the net, primarily doing research. Slow websites are my personal gripe. Here using websites with high usage like Apple, Microsoft or NASA (maybe I will try Victoria's Secret), the 400MHZ unit was still faster by a snap of your fingers. It comes down to the Zippy feeling again. It is a close call for me. The 300/1MB was a major improvement and well worth the money. Another $400 for this zippiness is questionable." (Having said that, just a few hours after he packed up the unit to send on to the next tester he was emailing me with his order for a 400MHz!) "The deciding factor was the improved performance of VPC, since I am (unfortunately) connected to a PC world and sometimes have to open files and run applications that are PC only. My other option was an Orange Micro board for my one precious PCI slot, but since I had VPC already, I can cost justify the G3 purchase and it leaves my PCI lost open for ? (a Firewire board perhaps). I'm not much of a 'Game' enthusiast as this TAM is my business machine, so I'm not able to comment on VPC running PC game software, but for accounting packages etc. it runs them at a pretty good clip, I would say Pentium 200MHz fast. I look forward to celebrating your anniversary. Speed is addicitive. Next thing you know, you will hear of secret company email where they target small children and hook them on faster cpu's... " |
You can buy here |
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