General Impressions: This is the fastest card we
have tested to date and it sure felt like it too! The strongest
area of improvement noted by Macbench 5.0 (scores
below) was in the graphics department. Active scrolling
in all of our applications lost that annoying stutter and became
as smooth as silk. Performance gains were significant across
the board, from finder functions to all of the applications
we ran with the card installed. Overall the experience was akin
to trading in your 1960's VW Bug for a Porsche. We should note
that the results we list below are at a clock setting of 420MHz.
This is above the default setting of 400MHz for this card. Overclocking
may void your warranty. Click
here for a performance comparison at the two clock settings.
Installation: This card comes with a row of 12 dip switches
that control the bus speed and ratio. This was a bit intimidating
at first but the card's manual has a frequency chart that
lists all possible (as well as recommended) settings. If you
don't feel bold enough to fiddle with the switches you can
always leave them at their default. The backside cache is
activated by a control panel instead of an extension. XLR8
also includes software for verifying your CPU and cache settings.
Stability: We had the card in our 9500 off and on for close
to 4 weeks. In addition to running test programs we used it
for gaming, site maintenance, web browsing etc. We never experienced
any instability or problems during our use even though we
were operating above the default 400MHz.
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and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby
acknowledged.
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