Vimage G3/225MHz upgrade for
Power Macintosh 6500
Company: Vimage
Estimated Price: $529.00
http://www.vimagestore.com

The 6500
Apple claims that the 6500 series (as well as the 6400) Macs are not upgradable. However, many people, myself included, did buy these machines. With a top of the line 56K modem, fast CD-ROM, large hard drive, and built in sup-woofer, these are very good computers. I knew it would always be on the trailing edge of technology processor wise. I knew that the 603e Motorola chip had run it course, and was a dead end CPU. But for the price... Along comes a claim from Vimage for a 6500 G3 upgrade. Wanting a G3 in the worse way, I was willing to give just about anything a shot, though I was skeptical at first. The 6500s were not meant to be upgraded, after all. Besides, do these types of "L2 cache G3 upgrades" really work? Moreover, just how stable would the machine be? Thanks to MacCPU, I had the last month to find out.

Seven Minutes to G3
Installation is pretty cut and dry. The first step is to install software, in this case a system extension titled Vpower PF G3, that allows the Mac to use the G3 card rather than the 603e.
Time spent: 1 minute.

Step 2; Turn off the Mac. Disconnect the power supply. Pulling out my motherboard was a simple matter of unscrewing two screws, and sliding out the board.
Time spent: 2 minutes.

Step 3; Locating and removing the L2 cache card. This is well marked on the motherboard, and to remove the card, you simply pull it up and out. The G3 card ships with an anti-static wristband so you don't fry the innards of your Mac. Once out, you insert the G3 card in the now empty slot.
Time spent: 2 minute.

Step 4: Reinstall the motherboard, replace the screws, plug the Mac back in, and boot up.
Time spent: 2 minutes.

Total installation time: 7 minutes

Amazed at how fast and simple installation went, I was still somewhat skeptical when I hit my power key to boot up the Mac. I shouldn't have worried. The Vpower PF G3 extension which makes the Mac use the G3 card had me worried. I had just upgraded the 6500 a few weeks before to Mac OS 8.5, and I really did not want any extension conflict problems. I was spoiled by how stable my Mac had become since the 8.1 upgrade, and G3 speeds will do me no good if my Mac starts crashing every ten minutes. However, there has yet to be any problems with the extension, and all if running very smooth.

Upon restart, the Vpower PF G3 extension is the first to load. What it essentially does upon start up is restart your Mac. Once you see its icon on screen, the Mac blinks once and restarts. Simple as that. No extension conflicts and no real slow down in starting up the Mac. In fact, once it has "Blinked" and starts using the G3 card, start up is at least twice as fast than it was running on the 603e CPU.

The numbers
I am not a big fan on numbers. I can look at a MacBench reading all day long and it does nothing for me. However, I did want to test the new G3 card on MacBench 5.0 and compare it with the 603e. The G3 is rated at 225MHz, while the 603e is rated at 250MHz. To the laymen, this may suggest that the 603e chip is faster. This is as far from the truth as you could be. The G3 is twice as fast at the same MHz rating as a 603e chip. Here is the score from MacBench 5.0 in the Processor test:

Real World
As I said, I am not much on test scores such as these, but it is nonetheless impressive to see the G3/225MHz score more than twice as high as the stock 250MHz/603e. But to really gauge just how much faster the 6500 performed with the G3 upgrade, I decided to run some tests of my own.

First, simply launching Netscape Communicator v4.04. (I repeated each opening twice to also gauge the Cache speed)

Base 6500 / 603e 250MHz
Launch time:
First launch: 13 seconds
Second launch: 6 seconds

Upgraded 6500 / G3 225MHz
Launch time:
First launch: 9 seconds
Second launch: 4 seconds

Next, I opened a 7.7MB Photoshop 4.0 TIFF file. (I again repeated each opening twice to gauge the Cache speed)

Base 6500 / 603e 250MHz
Launch time:
First launch: 27 seconds
Second launch: 17 seconds

Upgraded 6500 / G3 225MHz
Launch time:
First launch: 15 seconds
Second launch: 9 seconds

As you can see, things were really much faster with the G3 upgrade. Not only do the numbers above bear that out, but to really see it in action is a different story. The whole system is much faster, from opening windows to scrolling a long text document. Copying files went much faster. Switching between applications. Doing a search of my hard drive. Everything! In fact, after a week of using the G3 upgrade, when I went back to the 603e processor, I thought something may be wrong with my system. It really did seem that much slower.

Folks, this upgrade works, and works well. I was skeptical at first. I did not like removing my Cache card, thinking it may slow my machine down some. However, the G3 upgrade card has its own built-in 512K L2 chip, so you should not even give it a second thought.

Final Thoughts
This is simply an amazing piece of hardware. I now have a G3 Mac, without having to convert over to USB as I would have done with the iMac, and my fairly new computer is no longer at the end of its life cycle. I did not really think my 6500 was all that slow before I upgraded it. It was, after all, 250MHz. I simply had no idea of the overall speed increase this card would provide.

It is an easy upgrade that works as promised! I cannot give this product a high enough recommendation. And at less than half the cost of a new Apple G3! Wow! If you are thinking of upgrading to a G3, and you own a Power Mac 6500, I would strongly urge you to give this option a serious thought. Like me, you will not be disappointed.

Specifications
G3 225/112/512k Cache Card

MacMice Rating: 4.5

Tim Robertson
publisher@mymac.com