Sorry I didn't get back onto the thread quickly. I have been working 9-10 hour days on my new job, so it's been tough to do any posting till tonight.
I ended up having to take out the Rage 128 Pro. it was obstructing the air getting to/from the G3 upgrade causing a lock-up as soon as the Crescendo enabler kicked in throwing the G3 into action. It seemed to overheat.
I contacted the company thinking that their G3 was defective, but I happen to take off the heatsink. there was ZERO heatsink grease. Which surprises me. On top of that, the heatsink was overtightened causing the card to bow and pulled the heatsink away from the G3 CPU.
The heatsink does not touch the ram chips, but it needs to make contact with the G3 by far. I took it apart (4 screws), applied artic silver and put the heatink on PROPERLY. making sure not to tighten it too much, and made sure the board was straight, or rather. relatively. It seemed sitting in that box caused the board to have a permanent bow of some type. Can anyone else look at theirs and see if they L2 G3 has this issue?
Anyways, so I put it back in the machine, and this time I didn't bother to through the Rage 128 Pro in it. I noticed that video functions sped up by 7-10x. Norton System Info (Norton's machine test) put mine at about 7-10x the speed of a powermac 9500 200Mhz 604!!!!
Of course, the G3 sped up practically every part of the system. My hard drive transfer speeds with my Sonnet SATA Tempo card went from between 5MB/s under the 603, to well over 25MB/s!!!. Also, network transfers sky-rocketed compared to what it used to be, and throwing in a 10/100 D-Link 530TX+ PCI network card just threw the transfers through the roof. I copied my large music folder over (6GB) in very little time (I can't recall how long, but it might have been about 13-19 minutes)
Browsing using Classilla was a dream. Especially if you use Internet Explorer 4.5/5.x it just zoomed. Scrolling was dang-near smooth, and pages loaded quicker under IE 4.5 than I have seen load in chrome, Safari or FireFox. I don't think i counted a second on most pages I visited. Google loaded so quick, I was blown away as if the HTML file was locally on the machine.
Memory performance also went through the roof. I have 2x 60ns 64MB DIMMs in mine, and the performance bested the 9500/200Mhz by at least 2-3x it was that much faster.
I didn't get to test much video, but I wonder if it will play divx.... I will have to try. At the minimum, if you had a decent graphics card with enough VRAM, you should be able to play DVDs on it.
I think I made a nice purchase. Also, RAM doubler on a PowerBook 145B with 10MB RAM really helps. I have loaded most apps and they run quick. Does anyone know how to make RamDoubler work on OS 9? Probably not compatible. were they around at that time when OS 9 was taking off? I seem to recall the last product connectix really made for OS 9 was the PS-One emulator. It was cool, but you needed a pretty fast machine to play acceptably well.
