I am contemplating upgrading my 7500 (running an Apple P166 card). However, I still need to run the odd windows program (mostly network programs that require little horsepower). However, I want to be able to run the Windows programs at least as fast as the P166.
My question is what is the cheapest Mac I can buy that will get me about P166 speeds under emulation?
I have a G3 running Virtual PC [allocating 100 MB RAM to VPC]. It comes nowhere near P166 speed for any task [however trivial]. I recently got a couple of PCI DOS cards, one a 7" 100MHz card and the other a P166 card installed in a PPC 7300. Both of these out-perform VPC on the G3 xxx times over. Maybe emulation on a G4 or G5 is a lot faster [it would need to be].
All the same, VPC works well enough to use, if speed is not a [major] consideration.
Alternatively, what is the last tower that I can put my P166 card into?
I think, any PCI Mac with a 604 or better CPU, but pre-G3. IIRC you can also add a G3 or G4 upgrade card to these and still use the p166 card.
[A G3/4 upgrade card may be all you require for the 7500, and you'd be able to keep your existing setup, as is].
Here's one review for your consideration: <http://www.macwindows.com/windata2.html>
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Performance of the two emulators varies in relation to Orange Micro's low-end OrangePC 530 board (with a 166 MHz Cyrix processor). On non-G3 processors, the OrangePC 530 ran more than 4 times faster then the emulators -- even though OrangePC card had only 16 MB of RAM. On the G3 processor upgrade board in a Power Mac 7500, the OrangePC 530/166 ran more than twice as fast as either emulator on a G3 processor. However, on a Power Macintosh G3/300, the emulators approached the speed of the board in some tests, and were faster than the 166 MHz board in other tests when when the emulators had 40 or 64 MB RAM With FPU-intensive tests, the low-end OrangePC board with 16-MB RAM was still faster than the emulators running on a Power Mac G3/300.
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The review's a bit dated, but may have some bearing.
Mike.
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