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Review: OWC's Mercury G4/500, G4/400 & G3/500 ZIF CPU Upgrades How they compare in a Blue & White G3/350 System By Mike Published: 10/19/2001 (revised 10/26/2001 for G4/400 results)

Benchmark Test Results

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

Benchmark Tests

Benchmark tests were run with Altivec Fractal demo, CineBench 2000, and GaugePro memory bandwidth test results. Benchmarks are less important than real world apps/game tests. (The Apps/Game tests page has results of tests with iMovie2 (OS 9 and OS X), iTunes (OS X), Photoshop 5.5, Word 98 Scrolling, and popular 3D games like Quake3 (Classic and OS X) and Unreal Tournament.) Fractal FPU Benchmark: I used the freeware Altivec Fractal (Carbon) demo program (available here) to compare FPU performance of the B&W system with the original G3/350 CPU and the 500Mhz G3 and G4 upgrades. Default settings were used. (Note: MegaFlops/sec = Millions of Floating Point Operations per Second.) Support of Altivec instructions dramatically increases performance with the G4 upgrade. CineBench 2000 v1.0 Results: I originally tested with the 1998 Cinebench and reported the results to Maxon, who said they were working on an updated version. Within days they released an updated Cinebench 2000 which I used for all the tests below. (For more info see www.maxon.net/pages/download/benchmarks.html.) For a full explaination of the benchmark and how to read the results, see this page. All tests were run at 1024x768, millions color mode. Longer bars are faster. The graph above includes results from my Radeon AGP retail graphics card review scores using a single G4/500 AGP system. You can search for other Mac system/CPU/Video card CineBench 2000 results at my Mac Game/Video card performance database. If you download CineBench 2000, please enter your results. GaugePro Memory Bandwidth Tests: Newer Tech's (R.I.P.) GaugePro has a simple memory bandwidth test included. I've seen a lot of variation with this utility, so all my tests were run immediately after a clean reboot, with no other apps running. (GaugePro 1.1 is available at OWC's Newer Tech software mirror page.) As a FYI - GaugePro showed Altivec was fully supported/enabled with the G4/500 installed in the B&W G3. (OS 9.2.1 install with no addon cache enabler software.) Beige G3s require a cache enabler with any G4 upgrade. This may affect Altivec support in some cases. Altivec support requires OS 8.6 or later. (OS 9 or later preferred.)

For comparisons to other CPU Card upgrades and systems see the site list of CPU Card Reviews and Systems page.

The next page has results from real world applications. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page.

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