Sonnet, continues to come up with one innovative upgrade after another. Just a few weeks ago they announced an upgrade for the 7200 family of machines that fits in a PCI slot (previously these machines were not thought to be upgradable) and now they have extended the performance range of NuBus Macs with a technology they call Fortissimo.
Fortissimo is a bus doubling technology that creates a second bus which resides between the motherboard bus and the processor. With the Fortissimo card installed the system bus thinks that it is receiving data at the same frequency as the original processor while to the G3 processor it looks like the frequency is twice the speed of the original bus .... a sort of Panama Canal effect. Normally current G3 processors top out at 10X the system bus ( if you have a 40MHz bus in your machine the top speed you could run a G3 upgrade card would be 400MHz). For G4 cards the top speed is 9X the system bus.
Theoretically with Fortissimo technology you should be able to run an 800MHz G3 card in a Power Mac 7100, which has a 40MHz bus....we'll see if that pans out down the road when faster G3 and G4 chips are available. In the meantime Sonnet will have Fortissimo G3 upgrade cards running at 400MHz and 500MHz, for NuBus Macs in October. The fastest each of these cards will run in your machine will depend on the original speed of your system bus - see below.
Below we explore what performance gain you will see with these cards installed in the machines they are made for. We also take a comparative look at the price/performance equation of each card.
New Prices and the Machines The Cards Are Intended For
Note: This upgrade is due in October - Sonnet was not more specific.
Crescendo G3/Nubus 500/200/1MB Price $499.95
Crescendo G3/Nubus 400/200/1MB Price $399.95
Sonnet˙s Crescendo G3 upgrade card is compatible with the following Macintosh models:
What kind of performance gain are you getting for the money you'll be shelling out for the various cards?......
Scores marked in Red indicate this information was provided by Sonnet. Scores Marked in Blue indicate that this information was independently verified by MacSpeedZone.
And how much do you pay per performance point (price divided by performance score) ....
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For Great Prices On Upgrades 
