A couple of weeks back we received a press release from XLR8
announcing their new MACh Speed G3 Control software. The G3
Control software, which comes bundled with XLR8's G3 upgrade
cards, allows you to change the speed of your processor's
backside cache. MACh Speed G3 Control works with other accelerator
cards as well as native G3 machines. For our previous
Performance Edge article we ran MacBench 5.0 on our "revision
B" iMac, using XLR8's software to bump the backside cache
from 116MHz to 155MHz. The results showed a 20% improvement
in the processor score. We recently ran more extensive benchmarks
on our G3 PowerBook/266 and unfortunately the results were
not as dazzling.
Installation: Was quick and simple. The installer placed
an extension and control panel which allows you to change
the backside cache speed. A couple of other items are placed
on your drive as well, a program called "Power Control"
which you can use to run tests on your processor and RAM a
la TechTool. Power Control also provides you with information
on your current hardware configuration. The last item installed
is "PowerFrax" a fractal generator with built in
timer. The idea presumably being that you can run PowerFrax
with different cache settings to test for performance gains.
I didn't note a significant difference with any of the settings
including with the cache disabled!
On first restart, the MACh Speed software runs a quick test
to determine the fastest speed the cache can safely use. You
are then presented with a dialogue asking if you want to use
this default speed or try a faster speed which also might
work. Throwing caution to the wind I selected the fastest
choice available and promptly crashed my PowerBook! I rebooted
and humbly selected the "default" button in the
MACh Speed control panel. Below you will find results from
MacBench as well as several "real world" tests that
I ran on our PowerBook.
MacBench 5.0 Scores
Below you will find MacBench 5.0 scores for the PowerBook
G3/266 with three different cache settings. The standard cache
setting on this PowerBook is 133MHz, a 2:1 ratio. We have
set this as the 100% system for the charts. The fastest stable
setting we achieved with XLR8's software was 177MHz, a 3:2
ratio. We also used the MACh Speed control panel to disable
the cache entirely to see what affect it would have. For the
MacBench Scores longer bars and higher numbers are better.
PhotoShop 5.02 Tests
For the Photoshop tests we timed each task and set the score
relative to the stock PowerBook which received a score of
100. In this case shorter bars and lower numbers are better.
Question: We are puzzled by the lack of performance gains
in our PowerBook especially after the impressive results in
our original
tests on the iMac. Even more perplexing are the real world
results with the backside cache disabled. We have sent off
our results to XLR8 and will post their response, if any,
here.
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