Sonnet Technologies has announced a price cut on upgrade cards for Appleis PowerBook 1400 series. The Crescendo G3 card allows users to extend the life of their computer, and are engineered in such a way as to actually extend battery life on the machines. According to Sonnet:
Sonnet Technologies, the worldwide market share leader in processor upgrade cards for Apple Macintosh? computers, lowers prices on PowerBook 1400 G3 upgrades by $100.00. By offering consistently competitive pricing, Sonnet Technologies maintains its market leadership by setting the best price/performance standard for G3 and G4 processor upgrades.
- Crescendo G3/PB 333/512 $299.95 (was $399.95)
- Crescendo G3/PB 400/1M $399.95 (was $499.95)
The Crescendo G3/PB upgrades replace the original 117, 133, or 166 MHz 603e processor in the PowerBook 1400 machines. The Sonnet upgrade card uses a specially-configured, low-power copper IBM G3 processor which actually extends the battery life of the PowerBook 1400, in this case up to 18% with the 400 MHz upgrade, and up to 30% with the 333 MHz upgrade.
Fortissimo
The Sonnet Crescendo/PowerBook 1400 400 MHz upgrade touts the new Fortissimo technology which introduces a separate bus on the upgrade card running twice the speed of the host motherboard. The PowerBook 1400, which has an original bus speed of 33.3 MHz, would normally support a G3 running no faster than 10x the bus speed or 333MHz. With a Fortissimo bus speed of 66.6 MHz, the Sonnet Crescendo takes full advantage of a 400 MHz processor.
You can find more information at the Sonnet Technologies web site.