XLR8 seems to have gotten the jump on the rest of the market in shipping their new design 400MHz G3 CPU Upgrade. Thanks to Gary Dailey of GDTS/Daystar I was able to get one of the first of these cards available. In fact it is serial number 001. After 3 days of tests in two systems (a 9600/350 and Genesis), I am extremely pleased at the stability and performance of the XLR8 card.

As I addressed in my 'Past, Present and Future Issues of G3 CPU Card Upgrades', there has been some justifiable concern over possible stability issues of the new 400MHz G3 cards in most Macs, since these cards require a 50MHz bus speed to run the CPU at 400MHz. I'm pleased to say so far it has been 'plug and play' in both the 9600/350 and Genesis machines I have. I'll be doing further tests in the PowerCenter Pro and PowerTower Pro at a later date. Although I did not change the stock 400/200/50 settings, the card does allow bus speeds of 40 to 60MHz. (Tests in the PowerCenter Pro could be very interesting.)

I've spent the last day or so running every possible test I could in the Genesis with the XLR8/400 card. I booted from the 4 drive RAID array and optimized the Cheetah, ran all night RAM tests, extensive rendering tests, Photoshop, file copies from Cdrom and to/from hard drives and the ZIP drive. No errors of any kind were seen.

I was also surprised to see the Radius Thunder 3D card worked with the XLR8 400, unlike the other G3 cards I've tested here (several PowerForce G3 designs, not tested with Newer Tech's G3 cards yet). This is a major bonus for me as I expect superb Lightwave 3D performance with the combination. I can't imagine what hardware OpenGL support (with say Newer Tech's RenderPix) would be like with Lightwave 3D and a 400MHz G3 card.

Update: As noted in the main site news in late December 98, there have been stability problems/compatibility issues with both the PowerLogix G3/400 and Newer Tech G3/400 cards in Mach 5 systems. Both companies are working on a fix readers tell me. The Mach 5 systems are 8600/250 and 300Mhz, and 9600/300 and 350MHz systems. The Newer Tech 400Mhz card owner said there were switch settings to allow it to work in his 9600/350 but he had to set the card speed to under 400MHz. He said Newer Tech was to resolve this issue very soon. MacGurus has a series of notes on this below the Newer 400Mhz card listing that has more details. These issues may be resolved by the time you read this, but as of 1/1/99 there were no confirmed reports of this.

Review Tests/Ratings: The CPU card upgrade is rated on a scale of 1-10 in each of the following categories:

1. BenchMark Performance: MacBench 5.0 and Bytemark DR/3 scores of the card under test. Other system scores are shown for comparison.
2. Applications Performance: How the card did in several CPU intensive tests like Infini-D rendering, Bryce 2, etc.
3. Software Controls: Ease of use and features of the supplied software controls.
4. Documentation: How clear and complete the installation and setup instructions are in the supplied manual.
5. Specifications: Features and details on the hardware design. Includes compatibility information.
6. Summary: Final comments, ratings summary and pricing/availability.

Test Systems:
The base systems used for this review were both a Apple 9600/350 and a Genesis (9500 motherboard base) with the standard array of Quicktime 2.5 and Quickdraw 3D 1.5.3, PC exchange, PPP, etc. extensions. Disk cache was 4MB, virtual memory was off. Installed Ram was 320MB in the 9600, 512MB in the Genesis. The 9600 used a Radius Thunder 3D (bios/drivers v1.07) video card and the Genesis used a IXMicro Ultimate Rez (driver v1.02). In the 9600 a Jackhammer PCI SCSI card (no drives connected) was present in slot 4, slot 1 had the Thunder 3D card. For the Genesis, the PCI slots were filled with two ATTO PCI SCSI cards (slots 1 and 4), a FUSE capture card (slot 5) and a Ultimate Rez card in slot 6. Boot/test disks were the stock 4GB drive (500MB free) in the 9600; the Genesis used a Ultra Wide SCSI Seagate Cheetah drive attached to one of the ATTO UW SCSI cards.

The L2 Cache of the Genesis (soldered on 512K cache) was not disabled (not possible) and the 9600/350 Kansas based Mac has no motherboard L2 cache (it's on the CPU card of those models). Ram installed in the Genesis was matched pairs of 64MB DIMMS, the 9600 had a mix of the two stock 32MB EDO DIMMS, and two pairs from 64MB FPM DIMMS (one set from Bottom Line, one set from MacGurus). I was delighted to see that neither system had any problems with the 50MHz bus speed of the 400MHz XLR8 card. 1000+ iterations of Newer Tech's Ramometer tests were run prior to any testing to confirm there were no memory problems.

System Hardware Summary:

• Apple PowerMac 9600/350:
• 320MB RAM (two stock EDO 32MB, two pairs of 64MB FPM Dimms)
• Stock 4GB Hard Disk (80% full, not defragmented)
• Radius Thunder 3D PCI graphics card (bios/driver v1.07)
• OS 8.1, 4MB Disk Cache, VM off, QT 2.5, QD3D 1.5.3, [No Libmoto]

• Daystar Genesis (9500 mb based):
• 512MB RAM (matched pairs of 64MB FPM Dimms)
• Seagate Cheetah UW SCSI 4.5 GB HD (ST34501W)
• ATTO PCI SCSI card (2 cards installed to drive boot Cheetah and a 4 HD raid stripe set)
• IXMicro Ultimate Rez graphics card (driver v1.02)
• Aurora Fuse Video Capture card (drivers disabled during tests)
• OS 8.1, 4MB Disk Cache, VM off, QT 2.5, QD3D 1.5.3 [No Libmoto]

You can follow my preferred path through the review by continuing to the next page, or use the links below to jump to a specific page.