Review of Giga Designs 1.25GHz CPU Upgrade

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Review: Giga Designs G4 1.25GHz CPU Upgrade
(7455B CPU, 2MB L3 SDR Cache)
Published: 10/10/2003

Benchmark Test Results

Intro | Benchmarks | Apps Tests | Game Tests | Installation | Specs/Design

Benchmark Tests

Benchmark tests were run with CineBench 2003, Altivec Fractal Carbon demo 1.1.3 and Xbench. I reboot between all tests (benchmarks and apps/game tests) to ensure as clean/consistent a cache/memory state as possible. Pure benchmarks are far less important than real-world applications tests, but many want to see them regardless. (The Apps tests page has results of tests with iMovie3, iTunes4 , MPEG4 movie conversion and Photoshop 7.0. The game tests page includes results with popular 3D games like Jedi II, Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake3.)
Remember the red and orange bars are the Giga Designs 1.25GHz upgrade review sample, run at 1.33GHz and 1.467GHz respectively. It uses SDR L3 cache vs. DDR L3 for most of the other upgrades compared, which is why in some tests it scores a bit lower (tiny %) than a DDR L3 upgrade at the same speed. Also as mentioned originally in its review, the OWC G4 1.33GHz (DDR L3) has a faster cache bus speed than the Giga Designs upgrades which helps a little bit in some tests.

CineBench 2003 Results:
Since probably less than 1% of Mac users own Maxon's Cinema4D application, I use their freely available CineBench benchmark. (Which does more than just a simple timed render of a scene file - it also does shaded and wireframe model spins, "fly-throughs" of a 3D scene, etc. to show graphics card and cpu performance, not just rendering times.) CineBench 2003 is available at http://www.maxon.net/jumps/cinebench.html. As with all tests in this review, the desktop was set to 1600x1200 model, millions colors.

CineBench 2003 Results
As an FYI - here's a graph of the FPS rates from the 2 scenes in the Benchmark (results from OpenGL Hardware mode)

CineBench 2003 Scene FPS

Fractal FPU Benchmark:
I used the freeware Altivec Fractal (Carbon) demo v1.1.3 program (available here) to compare FPU performance of the original Dual G4/533 system and each of the upgrades. Test run in OS X 10.2.6 (not OS 9). Default settings were used. This is basically a FPU test (Altivec boosted and dual CPU aware). (Note: MegaFlops/sec = Millions of Floating Point Operations per Second.)

Fractal Demo Results

XBench Results:
Although XBench is now up to v1.1.3, since I had used 1.0 for the past tests with the other upgrades, I used 1.0 again so that the results would be comparable. (Xbench 1.1.3 has some optimizations for G5s and G4s, so you can't compare 1.0 scores to 1.1.3.)

XBench 1.0 Results

The next page has results from real world applications. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page.
(For other cpu upgrade reviews/articles, see the CPU upgrades page)

Index of Giga Designs 1.25GHz Review Pages
Intro | Benchmarks | Apps Tests | Game Tests | Installation | Specs/Design

- or -
Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM

Copyright © 2003.

No part of this sites content or images are to be reproduced or distributed in any form without written permission.
All brand or product names mentioned here are properties of their respective companies.

Users of the web site must read and are bound by the terms and conditions of use.

The Source for Mac Performance News and Reviews
Review: Giga Designs G4 1.25GHz CPU Upgrade (7455B CPU, 2MB L3 SDR Cache) Published: 10/10/2003
Benchmark Test Results
Intro \| Benchmarks \| Apps Tests \| Game Tests \| Installation \| Specs/Design
Benchmark Tests
Benchmark tests were run with CineBench 2003, Altivec Fractal Carbon demo 1.1.3 and Xbench. I reboot between all tests (benchmarks and apps/game tests) to ensure as clean/consistent a cache/memory state as possible. Pure benchmarks are far less important than real-world applications tests, but many want to see them regardless. (The Apps tests page has results of tests with iMovie3, iTunes4 , MPEG4 movie conversion and Photoshop 7.0. The game tests page includes results with popular 3D games like Jedi II, Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake3.) Remember the red and orange bars are the Giga Designs 1.25GHz upgrade review sample, run at 1.33GHz and 1.467GHz respectively. It uses SDR L3 cache vs. DDR L3 for most of the other upgrades compared, which is why in some tests it scores a bit lower (tiny %) than a DDR L3 upgrade at the same speed. Also as mentioned originally in its review, the OWC G4 1.33GHz (DDR L3) has a faster cache bus speed than the Giga Designs upgrades which helps a little bit in some tests. CineBench 2003 Results: Since probably less than 1% of Mac users own Maxon's Cinema4D application, I use their freely available CineBench benchmark. (Which does more than just a simple timed render of a scene file - it also does shaded and wireframe model spins, "fly-throughs" of a 3D scene, etc. to show graphics card and cpu performance, not just rendering times.) CineBench 2003 is available at http://www.maxon.net/jumps/cinebench.html. As with all tests in this review, the desktop was set to 1600x1200 model, millions colors. As an FYI - here's a graph of the FPS rates from the 2 scenes in the Benchmark (results from OpenGL Hardware mode) Fractal FPU Benchmark: I used the freeware Altivec Fractal (Carbon) demo v1.1.3 program (available here) to compare FPU performance of the original Dual G4/533 system and each of the upgrades. Test run in OS X 10.2.6 (not OS 9). Default settings were used. This is basically a FPU test (Altivec boosted and dual CPU aware). (Note: MegaFlops/sec = Millions of Floating Point Operations per Second.) XBench Results: Although XBench is now up to v1.1.3, since I had used 1.0 for the past tests with the other upgrades, I used 1.0 again so that the results would be comparable. (Xbench 1.1.3 has some optimizations for G5s and G4s, so you can't compare 1.0 scores to 1.1.3.)
The next page has results from real world applications. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page. (For other cpu upgrade reviews/articles, see the CPU upgrades page)

Index of Giga Designs 1.25GHz Review Pages Intro \| Benchmarks \| Apps Tests \| Game Tests \| Installation \| Specs/Design - or - Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM
Copyright © 2003. No part of this sites content or images are to be reproduced or distributed in any form without written permission. All brand or product names mentioned here are properties of their respective companies. Users of the web site must read and are bound by the terms and conditions of use.