The S900 series of machine from Mac clone manufacture UMAX
represented the company's high-end offerings. Based on the
same motherboard that is found in Apple's 9500 machines, the
S900s came in 150, 180, 200, 225, 233 and 250Mhz models. Some
of these models were relatively short lived as UMAX quickly
moved on to a faster version of the machine as faster processors
became available. These machines came in a Tower form factor
and were considered the high-end price/performance bargains
compared to computers in their product category coming from
Apple and other clone manufacturers (most notably Power Computing).
Though lower in price UMAX cut some corners in the performance
area that made the speed of these machines somewhat slower
than their competitors models running at the same clock rate.
Though there was some variation in features (for specific
feature of each machine see sidebar "Facts At A Glance")
most of the models came with the following:
Six PCI slots, one of which was occupied by an IMS TwinTurbo
128M graphics card (with either 4 or 8MB of VRAM), and one
of which was modified to take a UMAX manufactured dual Ultra
Wide SCSI and Fast Ethernet card.
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The SCSI/ethernet card was an optional add-on for all machines
except the S900/250 where it came preinstalled.Its PCI slot
can also take standard PCI cards. The processor of the S900s
resides on a removable card making upgrades simple. The installed
L2 cache is 512K which is soldered to the motherboard and
thus not upgradable. This low amount of cache hobbles the
higher clocked machines and was in large part the reason they
had trouble keeping up with their competition in the speed
department. They came with high-speed drives ranging from
2.1GB to 4.0GB and have 4 free drive bays. The Tsunami motherboard
was modified in several ways by UMAX. First it has a second
slot for an additional processor. This was to allow multiprocessing
without the necessity to discard the original processor. The
S900s also have a specific PCI to PCI bridging chip that allows
for faster processing of data passing between two PCI cards
when they are installed in adjacent card banks. The motherboard
has 8 DIMM slots allowing for up to 1GB of RAM, and memory
in these machines is capable of interleaving
which will give a marginal improvement in processor performance.
One complaint about these machines is that some users found
them rather noisy during operation..
Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results for the current
processor upgrades available for this machine. Results marked
in blue indicate that benchmark results were done by us. All
other processor card results were provided by the upgrade
manufacturer. The bar graphs below express results as a percentage
of improvement over the base machine, which receives a score
of 100%. Further down the page you will find a table with
the actual MacBench score.
** Note that MacBench does not take advantage of the Velocity
Engine (AltiVec instructions) of the G4. For AltiVec accelerated
applications
you can see a 1.5 to 4 times performance improvement over
the G3, depending on the application and the functions you
are trying to perform.
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