With the MACh Carrier, XLR8 has effectively revolutionized the upgrade path for first and second generation PCI-based Power Macs.The MACh Carrier is a standard CPU daughtercard that features a ZIF slot, allowing your older Power Mac to take advantage of the latest processor design and the benefits that come from doing so.
The MACh Carrier G3/500 is currently the company's top of the line G3 offering, bringing XLR8 up to par with Sonnet, which delivered a traditional 500 MHz G3 upgrade earlier this month. While performance was nearly identical to that of Sonnet's card (see our results below), the MACh Carrier offers two distinctive advantages that turns the card's $100 premium into a worth while investment.
The MACh Carrier's design, which allows it to be an "upgradeable upgrade," means that upgrading down the road requires you to only purchase a G4 ZIF, which is not only less expensive than a full daughtercard, but becomes even more affordable with XLR8's trade-in program. In January, for example, XLR8 plans to offer a G4 for as little as $500. ZIF processor cards also receive heavy discounts the moment they lose their top-of-the-line performance rating (a 400 MHz G3 ZIF can be purchased for under $300), making upgrades even less expensive if you settle for such an option.
Unlike Sonnet's Crescendo card, which offers nothing in the way of performance tweaking, the MACh Carrier can be tweaked through both software that adjusts the cache speed and traditional overclocking jumpers. The MACh Carrier G3/500 would cause our Mac to crash when the cache was set to anything higher than the recommended 250 MHz, 2:1 ratio but we were able to successfully overclock the card to 520 MHz without any stability issues. Oddly enough, when overclocked the card performed comparably to the stock 500 MHz setting in real world applications (the 4% increase in speed is difficult to notice) but produced MacBench scores almost 200 points lower.This anomoly, coupled with the very marginal performance improvement, led us to set the card back to its 500 MHz setting.
XLR8 also gets kudos for bundling a quality, reuseable anti-static wrist strap rather than a less expensive, disposable one like other companies. Also included is a small flat head screw driver for easing in the removal of the ZIF card when you choose to upgrade the Carrier in the future.
With the MACh Carrier, XLR8 has produced what will no doubt be the finest upgrade for your first or second generation PCI-based Power Mac. Non-carrier upgrades may cost less, but don't come close to offering the same value as XLR8 does. With this 500 MHz version, top performance is available now and will be again down the road.
