Inline L2 cache doubler card bypasses system bus
allowing for direct access to the processor at twice
the system bus speed
Comes with dual Ultra Wide SCSI/Fast Ethernet PCI
card
The S900 series of machine from Mac clone manufacture UMAX
represented the company's high-end offerings. Based on the
same motherboard that is found in Apple's 9500 machines, the
S900s came in 150, 180, 200, 225, 233 and 250Mhz models. Some
of these models were relatively short lived as UMAX quickly
moved on to a faster version of the machine as faster processors
became available. These machines came in a Tower form factor
and were considered the high-end price/performance bargains
compared to computers in their product category coming from
Apple and other clone manufacturers (most notably Power Computing).
Though lower in price UMAX cut some corners in the performance
area that made the speed of these machines somewhat slower
than their competitors models running at the same clock rate.
Though there was some variation in features (for specific
feature of each machine see sidebar "Facts At A Glance")
most of the models came with the following:
Six PCI slots, one of which was occupied by an IMS TwinTurbo
128M graphics card (with either 4 or 8MB of VRAM), and one
of which was modified to take a UMAX manufactured dual Ultra
Wide SCSI and Fast Ethernet card.
The SCSI/ethernet card was an optional add-on for all machines
except the S900/250 and S910/250, where it came preinstalled.Its
PCI slot can also take standard PCI cards. The processor of
the S900s resides on a removable card making upgrades simple.
The installed L2 cache is 512K which is soldered to the motherboard
and thus not upgradable. This low amount of cache hobbles
the higher clocked machines and was in large part the reason
they had trouble keeping up with their competition in the
speed department. They came with high-speed drives ranging
from 2.1GB to 4.0GB and have 4 free drive bays. The Tsunami
motherboard was modified in several ways by UMAX. First it
has a second slot for an additional processor. This was to
allow multiprocessing without the necessity to discard the
original processor. The S900s also have a specific PCI to
PCI bridging chip that allows for faster processing of data
passing between two PCI cards when they are installed in adjacent
card banks. The motherboard has 8 DIMM slots allowing for
up to 1GB of RAM, and memory in these machines is capable
of interleaving
which will give a marginal improvement in processor performance.
One complaint about these machines is that some users found
them rather noisy during operation..
For Great Prices On Upgrades
Check The Vendors Below
Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results for most of
the processor upgrades available for this machine. These results
are what the individual manufactures publish for their cards.
In other words the speed trials were run by the manufacturer.
For an independent evaluation of these cards check the Processor
Upgrade Page to see if we have results available. 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
scores.
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