Vimage Corporation entered the G3 Upgrade market this year with several innovative cards, including PowerBook 1400 and 2400 upgrades and L2 cache slot upgrades for many Macs that had been ignored by other companies (44/54/6400, 20th Anniv Mac, Starmax 3000, 4000). They also developed G3 upgrades for CPU card slot Macs like the 73/75/7600 and 85/86/95/9600. This review is of their most affordable upgrade card - the G3/233/512K Backside cache running at half the processor speed.

In addition to designing G3 upgrades that connect via the L2 cache slot, Vimage also distinguished themselves with a reputation for compatibility and reliability. They are one of only two G3 Upgrade companies that can boast of Adaptec PCI SCSI card compatibility (Newer Tech was first with this feature in Nov 1997 via a Firmware fix on their cards). Vimage seems to have done it in hardware as wide SCSI drives mounted in the 8600 (Adaptec 3940UW card) when booting the first time, before the Vimage extension was installed. Retrospect backups were not perfect however, as both tries resulted in one file (of over ten thousand) that failed to verify. Backups with the stock 604E CPU card passed. Dantz (makers of Retrospect) say that Vimage's G3 300/150 card passed with no errors in their tests so I'm at a loss to explain why they did not do so in my 8600 with the G3/233 card, but since the stock 604E card passed the test I can only assume that the G3 card was at fault. Dantz did not use a Travan TR4 tape drive as I did, perhaps that was a factor. No other compatibilty issues were found in running both OS 8.1 and OS 8.5.1 during the review period.

As usual, this review is divided up into pages covering Benchmarks, Applications performance Documentation, Hardware Design/Specifications and a Summary page. These pages are linked top and bottom of each page of the review. The red text in the link strip indicates the current page of the review. Unlike many 'reviews' in print and on the web, I'd rather give you too much info than not enough. The links to specific areas of the review allow you to read all pages or just those areas that interest you. If you prefer, you can just jump to the summary for a recap of how the card performed. The Specifications page lists compatibility info (Mac models, software and hardware) so that is not a page you should skip.

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 System:
The base system used for this review was an Apple 8600/250 (Mach 5/Kansas motherboard) which has no motherboard cache (it's on the CPU card of the Mach5 CPU card models). I used this system since the card is not listed as compatible with PowerComputing clones (my PowerTower pro or PowerCenter Pro) and also it's not listed as compatible with my 9600/350 (and a 233Mhz G3 would be a step down in performance I suspect). Installed Ram was 256MB, consisting of two stock 16MB EDO DIMMS, with the balance being 64MB FPM DIMMS (normally I don't like to mix EDO and FPM RAM but so far it has been no problem in this machine).

The stock Apple 4GB SCSI disk had OS 8.1 installed and the internal RAID Array was divided into two volumes, one bootable with OS 8.5.1 installed. Retrospect 4.1A was used for the backup/verification tests.

System Hardware Summary:

• Apple PowerMac 8600/250:
• 416MB RAM (two stock EDO 16MB, the rest were 64MB FPM Dimms)
• Stock 4GB Hard Disk (80% full, not defragmented)
• Onboard Video with 4MB Vram
• OS 8.1, Disk Cache set from 512k to 4MB, VM off, QT 2.5, QD3D 1.5.3, [No Libmoto or Speed Doubler]
• Installed PCI cards were a 3Dfx Power3D card, Adaptec 3940UW SCSI card and IXMicro TurboTV

• The internal RAID array consisted of 4 wide SCSI 2.2GB Quantum Vikings configured as two volumes, with OS 8.5.1 which was also used to verify backups and compatibily with the Adaptec wide SCSI controller card (dual channel 3940UW)
• A Travan 4 (4GB native/8GB Compressed) external Tape drive (Conner/Seagate CTT8000) was used in the Retrospect 4.1A backup tests.

Vimage Links: (removed after Vimage later went out of the CPU upgrade business and links were no longer valid.

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.