n the past month we have been inundated with
G3 and G4 cards for review. We received and reviewed cards
from Newer Technology, PowerLogix, Sonnet Technologies, and
XLR8. While the individual reviews provided a good idea of
the performance gains you could expect over the base 9500,
they didn't provide an overall ranking compared to other upgrade
card options. Here then, is the complete picture comparing
all of the cards we have tested in the past weeks. This page
only includes benchmarks. The full reviews include notes on
stability, ease of installation and much more. Use the links
below to read the individual reviews.
Test Machine Configuration
Our test machine was a 9500 with 96MB RAM and OS 9 installed.
We tested with an extension set comprised of all OS extensions
and control panels plus any required by the card being tested.
Virtual memory was turned off and disk cache was set to 512k.
These settings are consistent with those used on the MacBench
base reference machine, a beige G3/300. For the real world
tests, virtual memory was turned on and set to 97MB with the
exception of the Unreal framerate tests. Virtual memory was
set to 200MB for Unreal.
MacBench 5.0 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures
the performance of a Mac's processor, disk, and graphics subsystems
to name a few. MacBench normalizes all scores relative to
the base machine, a Power Macintosh G3/300. The base machine
receives a score of 1000. For all MacBench tests, higher numbers
mean better performance. For more detailed information on
MacBench click here. When possible, we tested
the cards with the processor and/or backside cache clocked
over their standard settings. A couple of points to consider
when viewing the scores below:
MacBench 5.0 came out well before the G4 processor and
was consequently not written to take advantage of or test
the Altivec (AKA Velocity) instruction set.
We initially tested the Newer G4/400 card with the 9500's
motherboard cache enabled due to boot problems when the
cache was disabled. Newer sent us a new extension which
allowed stable performance with the motherboard cache disabled.
We used the more recent extension for our full
review and have included MacBench scores with the older
software (denoted by "MB cache" in parentheses)
as well as the new software.
All tests on the XLR8 card were run using version 1.4.2
of their software. To achieve stable performance on our
9500 we had to enable "write-through" mode on
the card's backside cache. This caused a noticeable performance
hit. XLR8 has since released and sent us version 1.4.3 which
presumably fixes the problems we noted in our
review. We will retest with the new software and update
both our review and this page with our findings.
"Real World" Tests
(Shorter bars are better)
Time to Scroll a 574 page AppleWorks document
from top to bottom.
Using the same document as above we did a
search/replace command to replace the word "the"
with the word "macbench"
Photoshop 4 "Real World" Test Results
(Shorter bars are better)
Note: For the first three Photoshop tests (gaussian blur,
unsharp mask and high pass) we made use of the AltiVec plug-in
provided with the XLR8 card. This plug-in allows Photoshop
to make use of the special instruction set available on the
G4, providing a significant performance boost. XLR8 provides
this plug-in with all of their G4 upgrade cards for use with
Photoshop versions 3.x and 4.x. Adobe recently made
public their own plug-in for use with Photoshop 5.5 and
higher. Adobe will not guarantee their plug-in will work with
G4 upgrade cards but we don't anticipate any problems.
Render Boy 2.2.0
Time to render "Pool Table" Example
file
SoundJam MP3 Encode
Time to encode a CD track 4 minutes 29 seconds
in length. Since our 9500 is unable to run SoundJam, the scores
below are absolute (time in seconds) rather than relative
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