|  General Impressions: We looked at two different Crescendo models, the 266MHz and the 300MHz. Both come with a 1MB backside cache and use the same extension to run. Although the benchmarks below show a performance difference between the two cards, in day to day
use the difference was not very noticeable. The performance gain over our stock 9500 was quite noticeable however! Scrolling speed shot up even in windows heavy with graphics and the performance of our notoriously pokey Dreamweaver 1.2 became almost acceptable. Installation: Installation of the card and associated software went smoothly. The cards came with installation instructions for the supported Apple machines but not the supported clones. This does not present much of a problem as long as you have a manual for your machine explaining how to access the processor card. The software installer loads two extensions. The first one activates the backside cache, the second is the LibMoto extension, Motorola's freely available PowerPC math library. Additional software is also loaded that allows you to check your new processor and cache settings. | Supported Models | Apple: Power Mac 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8515, 8600, 9500, 9515 & 9600 Workgroup Server 7350, 8550 & 9650
Power Computing PowerWave
UMAX J700 & S900
DayStar Genesis 528, Millennium | Stability: We had each card in our 9500 for two or three days. During that time we experienced sporadic "bus errors" on startup. This was with a minimal set of system extensions plus sonnett's. Sonnet's tech support first faulted RAM doubler as the culprit, although it had been disabled at the time. Removing RAM Doubler didn't seem to help. Other times the machine would start with the same set of extensions without a problem. Very odd... On our second call to tech support they recommended a clean system install but we weren't willing to go there. Sonnet has since released a newer version of the extension (not to address this issue though) so if it was just a simple conflict perhaps it has been resolved.
MacBench 5.0 Results (Longer bars are better) Processor Disk Graphics
"Real World" Tests ( Shorter bars are better) Crescendo Card Stats | - | Type | Cooling System | Variable/Fixed Clock Rate | Tech Support | Warranty | Price Information | | Vimage
VPower G3/300 | PCI | Heat Sink | Fixed | Phone
949-261-1426
E-mail | 3 Years |
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