I know everybodys just DYING to hear the results of the QuadDoubler. I have mixed feelings about it. Here they are:
Well the QuadDoubler came in the mail today. Surprise surprise it doesn't work in the Quadra 800. However it does work in the motherboard they sent me. On close inspection, I was rather surpirsed that whatever motherboard MicroMac sent me is an exact replica of the Quadra 800 motherboard, EXCEPT for a couple of chips missing... There is no onboard network jack (which i know all 800s had), therefore it is missing the Sonic chip as well (theres just a blank square on the mystery motherboard). MicroMac was thoughtful enough to randomly send a nice Nubus ethernet card though, which has the strange Apple Connector on it, as well as the missing Sonic chip. So i'm gussing that card was originally made to just give the mystery motherboard all of the identical onboard networking capeabilities as the 800. It is also missing 8 of the chips labled "U". So I'm guessing that those are the onboard RAM, which would explain why the mystery motherboard has about 4 megs less ram than the Q800 when the same ram sticks are installed in each. Now as you can imagine I was getting P-Oed. The 800 motherboard wouldnt boot with the QuadDoubler as some of you said it wouldnt. Now I was just about ready to pack all this back up for MicroMac, but decided to load all the RAM and VRAM from the 800 motherboard onto the mystery motherboard and give it a run in the Quadra 800 case. Before I did this I ran the full Speedometer tests on the 800. I really wanted to know how much of a difference this thing was. So I saved the tests and did the board swap. After booting up from the mystery board, I ran speedometer again. WOW. The speed of this mystery board was immensely different from the Quadra 800 motherboard. Speedometer reported results I would consider fairly significant. In fact, every single Speedometer test (it runs 26 different tests for various parts of the computer) was faster on the mystery motherboard than on the 800, except for two. 8 bit and 16 bit video are slightly slower on the mystery board than on the 800. But the rest of the video is faster as well as the rest of all the tests. To just make sure for myself, I ran the only program I had that ran slow on the old Quadra 800 board. MpegDec. It was very important to me that my Quadra play mp3s. I have a lot of them. And the Quadra 800 didnt do it very well, even with a downsample of 2 of and quality 2 setting within MpegDec. And the Quadra simply WOULD not do it with a downsample of only 1, even with a quality of only 1. MpegDec plays my Mp3s absolutely perfectly with a downsample of 1 and quality 2 (the highest, and usually slowest settings for mpegdec, this setting usually froze up the 33mhz Quadra 800 board.) on the mystery motherboard. That was enough for me. So now the board is happily speeding along as i type this. I decided I'm going to keep his processor and board. Maybe it was a misunderstanding? After all he had a heavy german accent. I don't know what I should do about MicroMac, but I do know I will NEVER buy anything from MicroMac again, and I advise you dont either. -- Quadlist is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Quadlist info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/quadlist.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/quadlist%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
