Speed plus a dual PCI and NuBus option put Power's new Macs in a class by themselves.
Henry Bortman
604/120
Rating: Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice)
604/132
Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)
604/150
Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)
PREMIER MAC-CLONE MAKER Power Computing has redefined the playing field once again with its new line of aggressively priced clones. But this time around, Power's machines not only undercut Apple's Power Mac pricing but they also offer speed and configuration advantages that Apple can't currently match.
Power's new models -- the PowerWave 604/120, 604/132, and 604/150 -- are based on the "Tsunami" motherboard Apple uses in its Power Mac 9500. Each of the PowerWave systems comes with a fast PowerPC 604 processor and incorporates a PCI expansion bus. However, the PowerWave bus has a special twist -- its three PCI slots are located on a riser card, rather than directly on the motherboard. This enables Power to offer something Apple doesn't -- a $250 optional split-bus riser card that has two PCI slots and two NuBus slots. That means if you're upgrading to a PowerWave from an older NuBus-based system, you don't have to chuck your NuBus cards. The PowerWaves also offer a speed advantage over Apple's Power Macs -- the 150-MHz model is currently the fastest Mac OS system you can buy.
Price/Performance Edge
Pricing for the PowerWave systems positions them head to head with Apple's PCI-based Power Mac line. But you get more muscle with a PowerWave system than you do with its Apple counterpart. For example, Apple's Power Mac 7500/100 comes equipped with a 100-MHz 601 processor, 16 MB of RAM, a 1-GB hard drive, and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive. The price? About $3,000. Compare that with a similarly configured PowerWave 604/120 with its 120-MHz 604 processor -- it costs only about $200 more, and it's substantially faster than the Apple machine.
In our Processor test, using MacBench 3.0 (the new version of MacUser's benchmark-test suite), the PowerWave 604/120's processor was 35 percent faster than the Power Mac 7500/100's. Plus, you get an additional speed boost with the PowerWave's ATI Xclaim GA accelerated-graphics card. In our MacBench 3.0 Graphics Mix test, the ATI card in the PowerWave 604/120 was twice as fast as the Power Mac 7500/100's built-in graphics hardware.
Moving to the high end of the system scale, you can buy an Apple Power Mac 9500/132 equipped with 16 MB of RAM, a 512K L2 cache, a 1-GB hard drive, a quad-speed CD-ROM drive, and an ATI Xclaim GA card for slightly less than $5,100 from MacMall. An identically configured PowerWave 604/150 from the same source costs several hundred dollars less. And our MacBench 3.0 Processor test showed the PowerWave 604/150's processor to be 18 percent faster than the Power Mac 9500/132's.
We encountered some curious results, however, in our tests with the ATI accelerated-graphics card. Using the MacBench 3.0 Graphics Mix test to measure graphics performance for common business tasks, we determined that the PowerWave 604/132's ATI accelerated-graphics card is about 13 percent slower than its supposedly identical counterpart in a Power Mac 9500/120. At first, we suspected that these results were due to Power's implementation of the PCI expansion bus, but when we took the ATI card out of the 9500/120, installed it in the PowerWave 604/132, and conducted the tests again, our results showed that Apple's version of the card was faster than the ATI card provided with the PowerWave system. At press time, Power and ATI were aware of the problem and planned to have it fixed by the time you read this.
Mixed Blessing
Bang for the buck is not the only advantage offered by the PowerWave systems. The $250 PCI-and-NuBus riser card lets you opt for two PCI and two NuBus slots in place of the base model's three PCI slots. If you've shelled out big bucks in the past for NuBus accelerated-graphics, Fast-and-Wide SCSI, and video-digitizing cards, you'll like being able to hold onto your investment. Or maybe a PCI version of your favorite card doesn't even exist yet.
Still, the picture isn't entirely rosy with respect to Power's dual-bus option, as we found out when we tested several popular NuBus cards in a dual-bus-equipped PowerWave 604/132. To implement the dual bus, Power created a special bus-bridging chip, called StarGate. It works like a traffic cop, monitoring and routing the signals coming from the NuBus and PCI cards and making sure all the data keeps flowing. It's a tricky job.
Some of the NuBus cards we tested worked just fine. The RasterOps PaintBoard Prism GT accelerated-graphics card, for example, worked without a hitch. Same deal with the RasterOps Targa 2000 NuBus card -- it captured and played back digital video with no problem. Digidesign's two-card Pro Tools digital-audio-editing system performed as expected, as did ATTO's SiliconExpress IV SCSI card. However, the RAID software that came with the ATTO card did not work.
We also ran into trouble with the popular Radius Thunder IV GX*1360 accelerated-graphics card. Its DSP daughtercard accelerates many time-consuming Photoshop functions. But although we were able to get the accelerated-graphics portion of the Radius card to work just fine, the software required for the daughtercard wouldn't load. Remember that the PowerWaves already come with PCI-based accelerated-graphics capability, so owners of the Radius card are mainly going to want to continue taking advantage of its Photoshop acceleration. To buy a PCI card with Photoshop-acceleration capabilities equivalent to the Thunder IV GX's, you'll have to spend about $2,000.
We also tested the system with a National Instruments GPIB NuBus card, which you'll need if you want to drive some older Sharp and Howtek scanners. Although the card's drivers loaded, the card was unable to communicate with our scanner. National provided us with a utility for troubleshooting the card, but even with the utility, we couldn't get the card working with the scanner.
In light of these problems, you could argue that these cards were never designed to run on what is essentially a PCI-based system with NuBus cobbled onto it. Or you could say that if Power is advertising NuBus as a PowerWave option, any card that works in a NuBus-based Power Mac 6100, 7100, or 8100 should work in a PowerWave. We take the latter view. We highly recommend that you check with Power on the compatibility of your specific NuBus card with the PowerWave system before you buy.
Bundle Up
Speed and dual-bus technology aside, Power offers one more advantage over Apple -- a better "extras" bundle. PowerWave systems come with a keyboard and a mouse as well as several hundred dollars' worth of productivity software, including ClarisWorks, Now Utilities, Now Up-to-Date, Now Contact, hundreds of Bitstream fonts, and a variety of CD-ROM titles. Apple doesn't provide a keyboard, and it offers a software bundle only with its Performa systems.
To be fair, however, you get some great features with several Apple systems that you don't get with those from Power. One feature that makes Apple's Power Macintosh 7500 and 8500 so attractive is built-in digital-video input. The 8500 provides digital-video output as well. Although the video isn't exactly broadcast quality, it's quite adequate for home use and even for some in-house industrial projects. The comparably priced PowerWave 640/120 has no digital-video capabilities. In fact, Power currently offers nothing whatsoever in the digital-video department for any of its machines, although we expect to see that change in the near future.
Apple also has the edge in telephony. The Power Mac 7500 and 8500 each come with GeoPort fax and telephony software as well as Cypress Research's MegaPhone. By adding the $129 GeoPort adapter to the mix, you can turn your Mac into a digital speakerphone and answering machine.
The Bottom Line
Power has done it again. The company has designed and brought to market another powerful, less expensive alternative to Apple's Power Macs. But the new PowerWaves aren't for everyone. If what you need is maximum PCI expansion, you're better off with an Apple Power Mac -- PowerWave systems have only three PCI slots, whereas Apple's Power Macintosh 9500 has six. An Apple Power Mac is also a better choice if you need maximum RAM expansion -- the Power Mac 9500 has 12 DIMM slots, compared with 8 for the PowerWave systems. If you're in the market for basic digital-video capability, the Apple Power Macintosh 7500 and 8500 are your best bets. And although the PowerWave dual-bus option is an impressive offering, we recommend that you check with Power Computing before you buy, to ensure your favorite NuBus card will work with a PowerWave.
These issues aside, for those considering a high-end PCI-based system, there's no doubt that your money will go further with a PowerWave than with one of Apple's Power Mac models. And if you're looking for the ultimate in speed, don't look to Apple -- for now, the PowerWave 604/150 is the absolute fastest game in town.
Does the PowerWave's split-bus system slow it down when you have both a NuBus and a PCI card installed? To find out, we tested various combinations of PCI and NuBus cards -- specifically, accelerated-graphics and SCSI RAID cards -- in a PowerWave 604/132 and compared the results with those of an Apple Power Macintosh 8100/100 and 9500/132. The 8100/100 was equipped with two NuBus cards and the 9500/132 had two PCI cards installed. Our tests consisted of two Photoshop operations -- opening an image and scrolling -- that strain both cards simultaneously. As you can see, the PowerWave system handily outpaced both the Apple Power Mac 8100/100 and the 9500/132.
