The affordable PowerCurve 601/120 gives the Power Mac 7200/90 some stiff competition.
Henry Bortman
Clone Watch
ONLY TWO MONTHS after announcing its PowerWave line of PCI-based midrange and high-end systems, Power has rolled out another Mac clone: the PowerCurve 601/120. This economy model aims squarely at Apple's Power Macintosh 7200 systems -- and despite Apple's recent price cuts on 7200s, Power's got the edge: Although base configurations of the PowerCurve 601/120 and Apple's Power Mac 7200/90 (both with 8 MB of RAM) are identically priced at $1,699, that's as far as the similarity goes.
First there's speed. As its name suggests, the PowerCurve 601/120 sports a 120-MHz PowerPC 601 processor, the fastest 601 available. Apple's 7200/90, the faster of the two 7200 models, contains a 90-MHz 601. Also contributing to the PowerCurve 601/120's zip is 256K of L2 cache; the 7200/90 ships with an empty L2-cache slot. The PowerCurve 601/120 gets the zip-factor nod by a long shot -- processor speed, for example, is a full 50 percent faster than that of the 7200/90 (see charts).
Speaking of zip, you can buy a PowerCurve 601/120 with an optional internal Iomega Zip drive for an additional $159 or with a SyQuest EZ135 for an extra $149. The standard storage capacity of the PowerCurve 601/120 also tops the Power Mac 7200/90's: The PowerCurve includes an 850-MB hard-disk drive, whereas the 7200/90's drive is a mere 500-MB model.
Power gets the nod on flexibility as well. The PowerCurve 601/120 is available in two designs: the traditional Power desktop model and a new low-profile model. Each is available with three PCI expansion slots. As in Power's PowerWave systems, these slots are on a "riser" card. If you opt for the PowerCurve 601/120 desktop model, you can choose a riser card with a single PCI slot and a single NuBus slot -- but you'll pay a $250 premium for the dual-bus model.
The PowerCurve 601/120 also opens another significant upgrade path that is closed to Power Mac 7200 owners. The processors in Apple's 7500, 8500, and 9500 are installed on processor cards that plug into the motherboard's processor slot -- they can easily be upgraded with faster processors. Not so the 7200: To cut costs, Apple soldered the 7200's processor to the motherboard. Power Computing made sure that the PowerCurve 601/120 looks to the future: It contains a processor-card slot.
Better Bang for the Buck
Although Power Computing's PowerCurve 601/120 costs the same as Apple's Power Macintosh 7200/90 -- and ships with a 256K L2 cache and a larger hard drive than the 7200/90 -- MacBench 3.0 shows that the PowerCurve handles most business and publishing tasks about 50 percent faster than the 7200/90. MacBench 3.0 scores are relative to those of a Power Macintosh 6100/60, which is assigned a score of 10.0 in each test.
macbench 3.0 scores PROCESSOR FLOATING POINT DISK MIX PUBLISHING GRAPHICS MIX PUBLISHING
