Newer Technology, Inc. the original developer of third party Macintosh processor upgrades, today announced a product pairing of a G3 processor upgrade with the Farallon Communications Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card. Farallon has a long and successful history developing plug and play network interface cards. The Newer Technology 300MHz MAXpowr G3-L2E G3 processor upgrade and the Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card are designed for the most popular Power Mac and Performa models used primarily in the education market.
The Newer/Farallon product bundle provides present day Mac performance for about one-third the price of a single new Mac and represents approximately $70 in savings over common street prices per system. A savings of $3,500 can be realized when upgrading 50 systems.
The MAXpowr G3-L2E upgrade features a 300MHz G3 processor with 512K backside cache running on a 150MHz cache bus. It installs into the Level 2 cache slot and requires no hardware alterations to the computer. With the MAXpowr G3-L2E installed, the MacBench processor score of 975 is about three and a half times faster than the base score of a Performa 6400 (275MHz). By comparison, the newest 333MHz iMac has a MacBench score of 990, which means customers need not give up performance by going with a G3 upgrade.
The Farallon Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card installs into the Comm Slot II slot leaving valuable PCI slots open for additional upgrades. It automatically switches from 10BaseT to Fast 100BaseT connections. Full duplex support allows up to 200Mbps operation. The Fast EtherTX-10/100 Comm Slot II Card supports common network environments including AppleShare, Max OS X Server, Netware, as well as Windows NT. And network file transfer performance with the G3 upgrade installed is even faster.
Dr. Howard Pitler, principal at L'Ouverture Computer Magnet Elementary School said, "The combination of the powerful MAXpowr G3 upgrade and the Farallon Ethernet card has made a real impact on our ability to provide students with fast, capable computing tools. For instance, the stock Power Mac 5400/180 with the Farallon 10/100 Ethernet card took an average of 2:04 minutes or 124 seconds to complete the transfer of an 18.5 MB file - a huge improvement over the 10BaseT we were using. But, that is almost twice as long as the same computer and Ethernet card with the Newer MAXpowr G3 upgrade installed. Students and faculty use our network extensively and produce their own multimedia projects. Having the fastest hardware has made this possible. Saving money over new systems has also helped us stretch our budget and that's always welcome."
Benchmark tests show up to a 35% improvement in performance using Farallon's 2.0 driver and Fast EtherTX 10/100 Comm Slot II Card when compared to a third party card.
Compatibility
Power Mac 5400, 5500, 6400, 6500; Apple Performa 5400, 5410, 5420, 5430, 5440, 5500, 6360, 6400, 6410 and 6420.
Sample MacBench processor benchmark scores:
Performa 6400/180 275
Power 6500/225 320
MAXpowr G3-L2E 300/512K/150 975
iMac 333MHz 990
The MAXpowr G3-L2E and Farallon EtherTX 10/100 bundle is available July 5th from Authorized Education Resellers at an estimated street price of $399, part number 120576.