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The PowerCenter Pro series of Mac clones from Power Computing made their debut in the late winter of 1997. Initially there were two models, a 180Mhz and 210Mhz. A 240Mhz model will follow on later that summer. The machines came standard in a desktop enclosure, however for an extra $100 you could get your PowerCenter Pro inside a minitower. Built upon the same motherboard found in the 7200 series of PowerMacs from Apple, PowerComputing took full advantage of the boards ability to run a 60Mhz system bus. In contrast Apple clocked the 7200's system bus at 40Mhz. Despite being considered midrange machines, the PowerCenter Pros competed well with the high-end machines of the time, in terms of performance, at considerably lower cost.
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The processer found in these machines is the 604e which is located on a separate daughter card making its replacement a snap. They shipped with 16MB of RAM, 1MB of L2 cache, the 3D Rage II graphics chip from ATI for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, and 2MB of VRAM (expandable to 4MB). RAM is expandable to 512MB using 4 DIMM slots. Each machine has 3 PCI slots, one of which is occupied by a Wide Ultra SCSI-3 PCI card (20MBps). The drives consist of a 2GB 5,400 rpm hard drive and a 16X CD-ROM drive. There are both VGA and Mac monitor ports and the machines come with 10BASE-T and AAUI Ethernet. In the tower models there are two free 5.25" drive bays.
Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results for the current processor upgrades available for this machine. Results marked in blue indicate that benchmark results were done by us. All other processor card results were provided by the upgrade manufacturer. The bar graphs below express results as a percentage of improvement over the base machine, which receives a score of 100%. Further down the page you will find a table with the actual MacBench score.
** Note that MacBench does not take advantage of the Velocity Engine (AltiVec instructions) of the G4. For AltiVec accelerated applications you can see a 1.5 to 4 times performance improvement over the G3, depending on the application and the functions you are trying to perform.
"But I thought that the G4 was so much faster than the G3?" In some cases it is! For G4 Application specific scores - Click Here
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