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Should you Upgrade or Buy a New System? |
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Now that Apple has officially released the new Yosemite G3 PowerMacs, the big question being asked in the Mac community seems to be whether to buy one of these cutting edge Blue and White boxes or upgrade an older, existing Mac. The purpose of this article is to try and shed some light on just how well a souped up, good old beige Mac can complete with Apple’s new offerings. For the purposes of examining this issue, we’ll look at two systems: a Build to Order G3 and my own PowerMac 9600/350 named Swinger. Out of the box, Swinger’s specs were as follows: With these standard specs, Swinger performed nearly neck and neck with an Apple G3 running at 233Mhz. There is no doubt that the 350Mhz 604ev is a very fast processor. Nevertheless, speed and power being its own justification, I decided to make Swinger the ultimate Mac. As you will see, the present day Swinger is a Mac that, in my opinion, can stand toe to toe with anything Apple has to offer for now (and likely until G4 Macs start shipping). Let’s meet the other contestant for this test. In the other corner, wearing the white and blueberry chassis… Let me start that again. I went to the Apple store online and configured what I believe to be a Mac worthy of a Power User. A real Mac Geek, in other words. (SAY IT LOUD – I’M A GEEK AND I'M PROUD!) 400Mhz G3 PowerPC processor Quite an impressive Mac. And it comes at quite a price. Around $4900, to be specific. That’s a lot of lettuce, and while spending that much will get you a lot of Mac, it won’t hide the fact that regardless of how much Apple touts these new Macs as the most expandable ever, they are severely limited in several ways. We shall discuss these issues, as well as nearly every other pertinent aspect of the differences between our two base systems as we examine the transformation of Swinger from a stock 9600 to the Super Macintosh he is today. Note that I have specifically decided to configure both systems as high-end configurations. the majority of users trying to decide on whether or not to purchase a new G3 are likely to be folks who need the ultimate performance from their Mac, a quality that cannot always be had from Apple’s stock configurations. Part One: The Processor The new G3’s come in 300, 350 and 400Mhz speeds. There have been upgrade boards for older Macs that run as fast as 400Mhz available for at least two months now, so this is an easy one to match. As fast as the 350Mhz 604 is, a G3 of the same speed can run MUCH faster. Do not be daunted by the myriad of choices available now. This is a good thing, as it has established somewhat of a buyer’s market. G3 upgrades have never been priced so low, and availability of varying speeds, from 220Mhz to 400Mhz is fantastic. At last check, a 400Mhz board can be had for as little as $1000. The only thing to be wary of is choosing the right make and model for your needs. The key to making the right choice is doing a bit of homework. Know your Mac well and find a dealer that is knowledgeable and easy to contact. Most importantly, make sure the dealer you intend to purchase from has a liberal return policy in the event that the board you buy does not work properly in your Mac. (This really applies to ALL purchases)
Case in point: The installation directions were very clear and easy. The Newer boards have four jumper switches that come in a default setting of all OFF. An addendum to the manual informed me that if the board was to be used in a Mach 5 Mac (86/9600/300+) switches 1 and 4 would have to be turned on. After doing this, removing the 604 daughtercard, pressing the CUDA switch and placing the Newer card firmly in the processor slot, I reassembled Swinger and attempted to boot. No startup chime. Nothing.
I won’t bore you with the events of the next three days. Suffice to say that after many talks with Newer Tech support and the receipt of a replacement board, I was informed that there exists an acknowledged bug in the 400Mhz card that renders it inoperable in Mach 5 Macs. Newer is currently working on a fix, but will not have it ready until some time in the first quarter of ’99. My opinion is that Newer released the board earlier than it should have to keep up with other vendors who were getting their own 400Mhz boards to market. To their credit, Newer was superb in getting a replacement product out to me overnight and on a Saturday, no less. After much investigation, I found that the only 400Mhz board that was receiving unanimous praise was the XLR8 Mach Speed. I read Mike’s review on XLR8YourMac.com, and spoke to CEO and Head Honcho of MacGurus, Steve Trujillo, a.k.a. "Magician" and found that he had placed an XLR8 400 in his cherished "Beast," also a 9600, and it was working wonderfully. I received the XLR8 within three days of placing my order and it installed and worked the first time I booted. No setting changes, no tinkering. True plug and play. I won’t waste space with a long description of the installation process, as I could not exceed the quality of Mike’s excellent review mentioned above. Do check that out when making your own decision. Swinger felt like a new Mac. Every aspect of the system felt like it was on steroids. Windows JUMPED to the screen. Video scrolling and graphics seemed faster. 300Mhz Apple G3’s seemed slow compared to it. MacBench 5 scores jumped from 691 (the 604) to 1301. And all audio capture and editing worked without a hitch. This was a particular joy to me as previous XLR8 boards licensed their design from PowerLogix, whose boards have been known to have some compatibility issues with some Audio/Video hardware and software. Recently, XLR8 branched out and designed their own board from the ground up. The result is clearly one of the best-built G3 boards available, and the ONLY 400Mhz board that is fully compatible with ALL Macs.
Needless to say, Swinger is more than on par with a new system as far as processor speed in concerned. (As a matter of fact, it won’t be until the summer or later, when Apple releases systems that can exceed 400Mhz that I won’t be able to boast this) Part Two: Storage A major issue in regards to the Yosemite Macs is the glaring absence of SCSI. Apple does offer both a SCSI-2 compliant PCI card as well as an Ultra Wide PCI card through BTO, but this is a half-hearted attempt to make up for two large miscalculations on Apple’s part: For one, onboard SCSI has been a mainstay on Macs, virtually since the beginning, with millions of dollars invested in SCSI hardware by countless users. You might say that these devices can be connected to a SCSI PCI card, but the Yosemite Macs only have three slots. This is another major issue, and deserves its own section, so we’ll come back to this later. The fact of the matter is that there should be a SCSI option that allows for the use of these "legacy" devices without having to add anything to the computer. Secondly, Apple has chosen to adopt FireWire as its new standard high-speed data transfer protocol. On paper this might have looked good to Apple. It is, without a doubt, an exciting and new technology that brings the simplicity introduced to us by USB to peripherals such as FireWire drives, scanners, CD-R’s and such. But in reality, I feel it is a poor choice. while the technology has been around for a while, its implementation in the real world is truly in the infancy stage. The majority of people using FireWire are folks transferring video to and from FireWire video devices, and it is these people who should be the ones adding a PCI card to add FireWire to the system. Ideally, Apple should offer both FireWire and SCSI on the motherboard, but if the decision comes down to FireWire OR SCSI, I say make SCSI the default and let FireWire be the option. As if this issue wasn’t heated enough, there exists a situation FAR more serious. Recent Apple Technical notes state that because of the new G3’s ROM in RAM boot process, it is NOT POSSIBLE to boot from any devices attached to Apple’s lower end SCSI PCI card. This is disturbing as this card was intended to placate the many folks with several SCSI peripherals to connect to their new Mac. In a nutshell, here’s why the problem exists: In beige PowerMacs, the Startup Disk control panel held its preferences in PRAM, which was read at the beginning of the boot process. Because of the ROM in RAM implementation on Blue and White PowerMacs, the Startup Disk control panel’s preferences won’t be read until after the Mac has gathered its ROM information from the internal drive, thus loading key system information into RAM. Please note that I’m no engineer, and have only a perfunctory understanding of this issue at best. But, from what I can gather, it seems that all SCSI PCI cards will have to be updated to conform to specific Open Firmware specifications in order for a new G3 to "see" an attached drive early enough to boot from it. This is more than an inconvenience. Not only is one unable to boot from a SCSI connected volume, but it is impossible to boot from a RAID 0, or striped volume, regardless of any firmware updates on any SCSI card. Getting back to FireWire, at its best, it is still slower than the fastest flavor of SCSI available now, Ultra2 SCSI, which has a limit of 80MB per second. Moreover, while there is a plethora of vendors to choose from when purchasing any level of SCSI drive, virtually no major vendor has stepped up and embraced FireWire. In fact, most recently, two of the premier vendors of storage devices for the Mac, Seagate and Quantum, have issued statements to the effect that they are committed to SCSI, and have no plans to produce FireWire drives. There is, however, small but growing list of products and vendors promising future deliveries of FireWire add-ons, but these will likely not hit the channel until late in the first quarter at best. Apple has banked on a technology that is nowhere near ready to bear the weight that this decision carries. To complicate matters further, similar to the problem of booting from a SCSI connected volume, one cannot boot from a FireWire drive. Once again, this is no small matter. These days it is almost essential to have a separate drive containing a backup system folder to boot from when performing regular maintenance on your normal boot drive. While this will likely be worked out in the future, it is a huge detriment to the FireWire argument. For the time being, the new G3’s can be very much like an island unto themselves. For internal drives, Apple’s stock offerings are Ultra DMA drives. While these drives are good, reliable and faster than SCSI-2, they are not in the same league as Ultra Wide SCSI or Ultra2 SCSI. For Swinger, my choice was to build an Ultra2 RAID, thus bringing the disk sub-system quality to the highest level available. The first order of business was choosing the right Ultra2 SCSI card. I decided on the Initio Miles2 PCI card. The least expensive of the three available Ultra2 cards, (The Adaptec and ATTO being the other two – Note that Hammer Storage has chosen to make their Ultra2 JackHammer available ONLY when purchased with one of their high end and very costly RAID systems) the Miles2 is also the most reliable. There are numerous reports that the Adaptec suffers from compatibility issues with some G3 cards and has a nasty habit of operating in U/W mode rather than Ultra2, and the ATTO board has a tough time booting from an attached disk. (It kind of takes some of the joy away if you can’t boot from your fastest drive, doesn’t it? Someone tell this to Apple.) In an effort to wring every bit of performance out of the Ultra2 setup as possible, I decided to use two Miles2 cards in a dual channel capacity. Attaching two Ultra2 Seagate 9GB Cheetahs to each card suddenly took me to a world of disk performance I had read of, but never before come close to experiencing. The RAID averages reads and writes of 60MB per second. Sheer blinding speed, perfect for the most demanding graphic and A/V applications. Disk intensive programs like PhotoShop scream, even when large files require accessing the dedicated striped scratch partition. Programs launch almost instantly, and running Norton Disk Doctor is actually fun, as you watch the progress bar literally race across the screen. The RAID installation was fairly simple once I had quality cables, terminators and the right software with which to format the drives. I chose Granite Digital LVD cables and terminators and SoftRAID 2.1.5. The cables are expensive; there is no getting around that fact. But when you’re dealing with an already serious investment, both in performance and the sometimes priceless value of the data these cables will be carrying, they are well worth their price. SoftRAID, while not yet as well known as the venerable RAID Toolkit from FWB, (now rolled into Hard Disk Toolkit 3.0) has faster disk drivers and makes for a more stable RAID. And the price was right, as it comes with the Miles2 for free. A MAJOR point to be made here is that a TRUE dual channel RAID cannot be built using a new G3 as the base system, due to that fact the three available PCI slots are controlled by the same data-bus. In a six slot Mac, the slots are split into two groups of three, each run from its own "Bandit" chip. The first slot (the top one, closest to the CPU card) and the fourth slot (counting down) are "bus- mastering" slots that can command more bandwidth when needed, making them perfect for Ultra2 SCSI cards. Having the two Miles2’s on separate PCI buses, allows for true dual channel operation. The closest anyone will get to this on a Yosemite is if someone makes a dual channel Ultra2 board. At this time, no one does. (The other possible option is to get a PCI expansion chassis, but these have a shoddy reputation and so far Apple has not endorsed any such product, let alone one to match the appearance of the new Macs). The four drive, 36BG Ultra2 RAID I built far surpasses anything Apple has to offer, even the 100GB, three 36GB IBM option Jobs spoke of (which is currently not yet available). For the sake of cost, let’s trim down this setup a bit and figure the expense of just one Miles2 and two 9GB Cheetahs. This gives us a total of approximately $1700. You may very well be able to get below this figure if your dealer will grant you a special bundle price. Also, you can go with 4.5 GB Cheetahs, which would save you $400-500. My only note of caution here is to not give in to the temptation of going with lesser quality drives than Seagate Cheetahs, especially when Ultra2 is concerned. Surely, there are other vendors who make fine drives, some of which are less costly than the Cheetahs, but ask anyone who knows their drives and you’ll get the same answer… Cheetahs are the best, the fastest, the kings of speed. Assuming we shall continue with the two 9GB Cheetah RAID, our overall upgrade total thus far is $2970. Part Three: Memory This is a rather subjective issue as many of us may already have a large amount of RAM installed in the Mac to be upgraded. Even if adding more RAM to an older Mac is part of the package, these DIMMs are significantly cheaper than the new SDRAM used in the Yosemites. 512MB of DRAM for an 86/9600 will run you from $800 to $960. The memory for the new Macs is far more expensive and is still not widely available. Only you know how much RAM you need for your system, based on the applications you use. I shall offer two options for the amount of RAM to be added to our systems for the sake of comparison. If these figures are not in accordance with your needs, please factor this cost in for yourself as we proceed. For the purposes of our comparison, however, we shall figure in the cost of both 256 and 512MB of RAM. Part Four: Graphics
There’s no question that Apple hit a home run by being the first to utilize ATI’s RAGE 128 chip set for its graphics. Just as folks were clamoring for dedicated Voodoo II cards, here comes ATI with a chip that from many first hand accounts, surpasses VD II. Have no fear. ATI shall be releasing this technology on PCI cards imminently, and in three different configurations: one geared for gamers, one for graphic designers, and one for the in-betweeners. The highest cost card is the Nexus 128 at an ESP of $299. For now, I use the stock Twin Turbo video card for my second monitor. An IXMicro Ultimate Rez hooked up to a Game Wizard powers my main monitor. While this setup provides excellent graphics power, I can tell you with certainty that I shall be purchasing two new ATI cards as soon as they are available. Part Five: Peripheral Connections What remains is an "either or" fork in the road. The new Macs offer USB in addition to FireWire. USB is a wonderful new standard that fits into the Idea of the Mac perfectly. In other words, it is idiot proof, plug and play. Just attach a USB device and use it. No restarting and certainly no worrying about whether or not you fried your motherboard because your keyboard cable got pulled out of its jack. Still, USB is really only suited for input devices and certain output peripherals such as printers, removable media (such as a USB Zip drive) or external modems. Some vendors have already released USB scanners – I know there already is such an offering from UMAX, but at USB’s 12mbs/sec bandwidth, scanning a large image and getting it to open in PhotoShop may take a while. This is where FireWire comes in to act as the supposed heir to the SCSI throne. It boasts speeds of up to 50MB/sec. and with all the plug and play ease of USB. I must say that the prospect of being able to connect 126 devices without having to set any ID’s or termination is very attractive. Still, as mentioned above, companies are only starting to announce what FireWire products they shall offer. As for when they’ll ship, who knows? And the question still looms large of whether someone will implement a way to allow a Yosemite to boot from a FireWire drive. An older Mac, on the other hand, obviously does not have USB and FireWire. However, by the simple addition of a corresponding PCI card, these technologies and all their benefits can be added to a Mac’s plethora of connectivity options. This is also true for the standard 100baseT Ethernet or BTO option Gigabit Ethernet Apple is offering. Obviously, at this point in time, adding USB and FireWire capabilities to an older Mac is not by any means a pressing matter. The main point is that the Macs that have six PCI slots have an advantage over the new Macs in that they truly offer the REAL expandability that Apple claims the Yosemite’s have. What Now? What we arrive at here is the most daunting question of this whole process: Does the Mac you now own have enough usefulness and expandability to warrant a few thousand dollars worth of upgrading? This is highly personal choice, as a new Blue and White can be had for as little as $1599 for a base configuration. Still, compared side by side, our special guest, Swinger, and the BTO G3 are not that far off in cost. In fact, in the case of a well equipped Mac, upgrading can offer substantial savings. See the table below.
Let me offer my own opinions: If you are dealing with a three slot Mac, then the PCI slot issue suddenly becomes a level playing field. Obviously, you can upgrade such a system to the point where only Apple’s top of the line model would give it a run for its money, but this may be just for the sake of doing it. Don’t climb the mountain because it’s there. Climb it because the view its peak grants you empowers you to reach higher than you’d ever do otherwise. If you’re on the fence, don’t have a ton of money invested in SCSI devices, and aren’t put off by the prospect of waiting for USB and FireWire devices to be released, perhaps a new Mac is the right way to go. This would be especially true, I think, in the case Macs with smaller form factors having no PCI slots. Just be aware of the present limitations of FireWire and add-on SCSI with the new Macs. These are just my own thoughts and there may very well be an owner of a 7500 out there who would happy as a clam to just get the speed benefit of a 300Mhz G3 board with a 512k backside cache.
Like I said earlier, this a very personal and subjective choice. Ultimately, only you will know which fork in the road to take. Your decision may be based on practicality, financial restraints, or even emotional motives. What I have tried to do here is lay out some options and chiefly prove that with the right planning, the right choices and the right hardware, an older, Beige Mac can out gun even a snazzy new Blue and White. Darin Ames
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