What a Day: Just got back from Chester, Virginia. What a waste of the day. The only positive thing from the whole trip was I stopped by a CompUSA on the way back and finally picked up a Creative Voodoo II 12MB board ($299). One salesman literally would not sell it to me, saying now the 8MB Diamond Monster 3D II was so much better, etc., etc. I don't know what the problem was but he really did not want to sell me the card. I was amazed. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favor (or was saving a few for friends maybe?).

After his comment that Intel had put some sort of fuse in Pentium II that would burn out in a year if overclocked (yeah, right) I decided I'd had enough and went to the information desk. Four each of the Monster 3D II and Voodoo Blaster II were shown as in stock. However after I mentioned that the original salesman said no Monster II's were in stock, they made a call and then said that the Monster 3D II's were stolen, so the number was not accurate. When I said I d take the Creative Voodoo Blaster II, after much back and forth and calling they said they were gone too.

I threw my hands up and almost walked away. On a hunch, I went back to the counter near the Video cards and asked a different salesman (the other guy had thankfully left) who immediately said they had the Voodoo Blaster II card. He unlocked the door to the storage area and came out with one brand new 12MB Voodoo II card. Amazing.

On my way to the checkout lane I waved the box at the information desk clerks and said thanks for a totally perplexing shopping experience.

Anyway - the real story there was the problems with card theft. All the Voodoo II cards were kept locked up. In fact the person at the checkout said that the 4 Monster 3D II cards shown "in stock" were returns that ended up being empty boxes with phone books inside! Does this indicate the level of Voodoo II insanity out there? This was the most bizarre shopping experience I've ever had - bar none.

BTW, Quake II at 800x600 ROCKS (PII 300). Definitely smoother than the original Voodoo card I had at that resolution. Quake 1 TimeDemo Demo 1 score at 640x480 was 68.9 fps(with two other apps running and a internet connection active) using the original drivers (not the latest release). With the original 3Dfx card the best I obtained before was 38.7 fps (card running at 57 mhz with all the tweaks). I can't wait for the release of the Mac Voodoo II drivers! [4:00 PM Update]

Site Anniversary Special Delayed: Due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to go away on personal business very early this morning. Since I was answering mail until after midnight again, this prevented me from writing the "Year in Review" article that was to be posted today. I've very unhappy about this but it can't be avoided. Please check back tomorrow for the Site Anniversary special edition.

I do want to take this opportunity to say thanks to everyone who has visited the site, sent news or tips in the last year. Thanks to you this site went from a tiny one page review to a Top 10 Macintosh site. Although it has been an incredible amount of work, the reader comments make it the most satisfying work I've ever done. To know that I've personally helped tens of thousands of Mac owners solve problems and upgrade their Macs (saving money and learning something in the process) is what keeps me doing this. I assure you the best is yet to come.

Please check back tomorrow for my look back at the changes I've seen in the last year, and a look ahead at what's in store this year. I will announce the 50 winners of the site T-Shirt tomorrow as well - don't miss it!

Speed Doubler vs Net Doubler: Which is faster for network copying? You might be surprised at the results that Parker Beeson found in a head-to-head test of these utilities.

" I was looking at ways to increase the speed of my little 10-Base2, three mac, ethernet network. I stumbled across NetDoubler from Asante and was using SpeedDoubler already without the built-in TCP/IP network copying (doh... stupid!). Anyway, Asante claimed some impressive acceleration so I downloaded their demo and thought I'd compare with Speed Doubler's TCP/IP Network Copy. Interesting results...

Results between an 8600/300 MacOS 8.1 w/ full extensions ("real world") and a PowerBase 180 MacOS 8.1 w/ full extensions using built in FileSharing over the 10Base-2.

Copying a 14.4MB stuffed (.sit) file three times and averaging the score (reflecting sheer throughput, a bunch of small files would obviously slows things down):

Without either SD or NetDoubler - 55secs.
With just NetDoubler (using TCP/IP) - 24secs.
With just SpeedDoubler (using TCP/IP) - 26secs.

Conclusion:

Since I already own SpeedDoubler I think I'll pass on NetDoubler. I suspect that the few seconds savings over SD is just the TCP/IP pre-transfer compression that NetDoubler uses (according to the docs). Anyway, those few seconds don't justify the price difference in my opinion. I was really impressed by both SD and NetDoubler over plain AppleTalk though. TCP/IP is clearly *way* faster than straight AppleTalk (no news there).

Please feel free to have people contact me if I'm not utilizing something in NetDoubler that would change the results. I read all docs and followed directions so I don't think I'm missing anything. Just re-confirms in my head that Connectix kicks... er... ass!!!"
Parker Beeson

Apple QD3D Card Feedback: I received two mails last night in response to my post in yesterday's news about the Apple Quickdraw 3D accelerator card.

"Dear Mike,
I am glad that you popped one of those cards in your machine. I also fell for the low price and installed it in my old 9500. I was going to write you and ask how could I tell it was really working. The little Gerbil demo seemed to look and run the same whether or not the hardware extensions were loaded. The other game demo would indicate that it could not find the board if the extensions were not loaded, but it seemed to work the same.

I currently am not interested in games (yet :)) but was hoping to find an inexpensive (but not cheap) 3D card to help with Strata Vision 3D, or the 3D plug-in in Canvas.
Sincerely,
Bill Teawell"

" Hi Mike,
The Apple QD3D card (white magic) works fine in my system. I had a ATI XClaim VR, which was slower than the Apple card. The ATI also had severe display errors and no correct transparency. So I "trashed" the ATI VR. [Note - this must have been a Rage II card, as even the Rage II+ in the Apple G3 supports transparency fine from my tests, and the RageII+ was twice as fast as the Apple card in tests. The RagePro is even faster.-Mike]

I once had 2 Apple cards installed in my 9500. It does not boost the speed up (maybe 10-20%), it just makes a smoother picture. Adding more than 2 cards wont do anything I heard.

The Apple card also has the advantage that it is independent from any monitor, so you can accelerate on any monitor. Itīs a nice card for older systems.
greetings
Tobias Jachmann"

Just a note - the version of RaveBench I have often skips over tests like transparency even when the card supports it. I saw this in tests of the Apple G3 onboard video. Two tests (environment mapping and transparency) were skipped in the automated test run, but selected the tests manually showed that the chip does support them properly. This could be a bug in how the driver reports its capabilities, I'm not sure.

Voodoo II News: Saw a Gamecenter.com article yesterday on the Canopus Pure 3D II based on the Voodoo II chipset. The card will come with 12 MB of RAM, a built-in cooling fan and TV outputs. Like the original Pure 3D, it is expected to be the class act of Voodoo II cards. It's PC only of course, and is now delayed until May 18th due to chipset availability.

More Amazing PowerForce G3 220/110 results: Based on feedback, no wonder PowerLogix can't keep dealers supplied with the 220/110 models. Not only are they priced under $500, but the performance most owners report exceeds the Apple G3/266 and many higher priced G3 CPU card upgrades. Here's a sample of the latest mail:

" Mike,
Awesome site, I read it multiple times a day (don't want to miss any updates.) :) I received the PF G3 220/110 from Bottom Line yesterday and started testing. I settled at 322.1/128.9/43 (9/9 on the switches.) It's been running without a problem. I've run MacBench, BYTEMark, BYTEMark in VPC 2.0/Win95, Bryce, Studio Pro, Infini-D and Photoshop tests, all blazing fast and no problems. Here are some benchmarks:

MacBench
Integer - 958
Floating Point - 1020

BYTEMark
Integer - 10.68
Floating Point - 6.9

BYTEMark Win95 (VPC 2.0)
Integer - 1.64
Floating Point - 1.2

I have a 7600 with 80MB RAM. All tests were run with a full set of extensions and Libmoto, no Speed Doubler. I'll keep running tests to verify that the CPU is not having problems, but it looks rock solid.

Andy Fenner
SysAdmin
School of Journalism
The Ohio State University"

It seems I was sent a "slow" one for the review, it 'only' ran 291mhz. I can't remember getting so much mail on one particular card in such a short period of time.

I posted this several days ago, but why not go vote for the MacOS in Yahoo's "favorite OS" poll at: http://features1.yahoo.com/survey. The Mac is blowing away the competition.

Tweek Digital Specials: Scott Karlins of Tweek Digital sent notice of a new sales page at their site:

" Mike,
I thought your readers might want to know of the new items on the 'Sales' page of Tweek Digital's Web site.

Genesis MP Chassis Upgrades:
Send Tweek Digital your Apple PowerMac 8500 or 9500 and we will transform it into a Genesis. Price includes the transfer of your logic board, processor card and all peripherals into the Genesis Chassis.

Price: $799.00 Plus the shipping of your choice. Add an nPOWER 400 Multiprocessing card for only $450.00 with your purchase of a Genesis MP Chassis Upgrade.

nPOWER 400 Multiprocessor Upgrade Cards:
DayStar's nPOWER 400 Multiprocessing Upgrade delivers the worlds fastest dual-processor performance available for any Mac OS system. This powerful upgrade has two 200Mhz PowerPC 604e processors for unparalleled speed. Price: $499.00 Plus the shipping of your choice.

If anyone has any questions regarding these items please feel free to call or email Tweek Digital or visit our web site.

Tweek Digital
770-564-8933
sales@tweek.com
http://www.tweek.com/"

Tweek has provided contract support for the Genesis since Daystar normal operations closed.

If you've not checked lately, Apple's InfoAlley has a lot of updates posted recently.

Search Engine Added: Looking for a previous news post or feature? Search the site for it! Daily News archives go back to November 1997 and all review articles are searched as well.

In news from the Dark Side, for details on the 400 mhz Pentium II and its 100mhz system bus, see this computers.com article.

T-Shirt Logo Voting is over! Due to leaving town on personal business, I'll have to post the winner tomorrow. Free T-Shirts will be awarded to 50 of those who voted in the design contest.

Need Help? Don't forget to check the FAQ, Performance Basics, Links, and Forums for solutions to your problems or answers to tech support questions. They have a lot of good info and are a great source of help.

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