What do all of these components have in common?
They upgrade Power Mac G4 AGP systems!

Upgrading the 100MHz Power Macintosh G4 AGP machines
Part 3 of a continuing series

(Updated 1/31/03 with Sonnet G4/1.2GHz testing)

by Jamie Dresser

PowerLogix Duals - Two Brains are definitely better than one!

In the first 2 parts of this upgrade series, we examined the first high speed upgrades for AGP Power Macintosh systems - the PowerLogix PowerForce Series 100 800MHz and 1GHz single processor upgrades. That was a couple of months ago now, and PowerLogix truly has a runaway best selling line of accelerators on their hands. The PowerForce Series 100 was the first processor upgrade to use the PowerPC 7455 processor, and the first upgrade to reach the magic 1GHz level. Judging by the sales, a lot of people were dying to upgrade their AGP Power Macintosh system.

What would PowerLogix do for an encore? Release the PowerLogix Series 100 Dual Processor upgrades!

This is our first look at the PowerLogix Series 100 Dual line - and the first processors we received are the 800MHz models. We received the 1GHz duals today, unfortunately there was not enough time to include them in this test. I will most certainly revise the scores sometime next week when the testing is performed on it - keep your eyes on our product reviews / benchmarking area for that update.

Also new in this round of testing is the single processor PowerLogix PowerForce Series 100 700MHz upgrade card. It's a bit different than any of the other Series 100 cards as it has only 1MB of L3 cache. But, it's a fantastic low price leader for anybody that wants to bump their system up "just a little" to 700MHz. All in all, it offers a lot of bang for the buck.

Sonnet's Ultra-Fast 1.2GHz Processor

Sonnet definitely is showing their muscle with the Encore/ST single processor upgrades, using the Motorola G4/7450, 7455 and 7455A chips as fast as 1.2GHz! Sonnet has chosen to go all out with their cache chips, they are using DDRAM L3 cache chips whereas the PowerLogix utilizes SDRAM L3 cache chips. PowerLogix has published a white paper on the differences between DDRAM and SDRAM, it's available to read by clicking here. (262k PDF file, Adobe Acrobat required).

Graphics Powerhouse

In previous testing, we had concentrated on 2 areas of performance gain, the processor, and the graphics card. In every test performed, unsurprisingly, the addition of a new graphics card was a monumental gain in every aspect for the systems tested. The graphics card in all of these tests will now be an ATI RADEON 8500 high performance video card for this reason - if you have not upgraded your video card, we STRONGLY recommend it. The stock ATI RAGE and nVidia GeForce2 graphics cards just can't compare with the RADEON 8500, it's an awesome performer. I tested the 8500 at length against a number of cards, including the very hard to find nVidia GeForce3 in a test back in July in both PowerMac G4 Digital Audio and QuickSilver systems. Even though those two machines have a 4x AGP bus the performance advantage carries over to the 2x AGP systems here, such as the Sawtooth and Gigabit Ethernet. I encourage you to check the tests out here - Digital Audio test, Quicksilver test.

Test System Specifications:

In all tests here, the following system was used / tested.

• Power Macintosh G4 "AGP" "Gigabit Ethernet", 1.5GB RAM, stock hard drive, stock CD/DVD drive, and the aforementioned ATI RADEON 8500 AGP graphics processor.

Page 2. Let1KWindowsBloom, AltiVec Fractal Carbon, MacBench 5 and CineBench 2000

Page 3. iTunes 3.0, Adobe Photoshop 7, Quake 3, and boot time.

Page 4. Exporting DV to MPEG-2 and CPU Loading test