Review of Giga Designs Fanless 1GHz Cube CPU Upgrade

A Click shows your site support to my Sponsors

The Source for Mac Performance News and Reviews

Review: Giga Designs 7455A G4 1GHz Cube CPU Upgrade
(2MB L3 SDR Cache)
Tested: 12/5/2003

Benchmark Test Results

Intro | Benchmarks | Apps Tests | Game Tests | Installation | Specs/Design

Benchmark Tests

Benchmark tests were run with Altivec Fractal Carbon demo 1.2, CineBench 2003, and Xbench 1.1.3. I reboot between all tests (benchmarks and apps/game tests) to ensure as clean/consistent a cache/memory state as possible. Pure benchmarks are far less important than real-world applications tests, but many want to see them regardless. (The Apps tests page has results of tests with iMovie3, iTunes4 , MPEG4 movie conversion and Photoshop 7.0. The game tests page includes results with popular 3D games like Jedi II, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake3.)

Fractal FPU Benchmark:
I used the freeware Altivec Fractal (Carbon) demo v1.2 program (available here) to compare FPU performance of the original Dual G4/533 system and each of the upgrades. Test run in OS X 10.3.1 (not OS 9). Default settings were used. This is basically a FPU test (Altivec boosted and dual CPU aware). (Note: MegaFlops/sec = Millions of Floating Point Operations per Second.)

Fractal Demo Results

CineBench 2003 Results:
Since probably less than 1% of Mac users own Maxon's Cinema4D application, I use their freely available CineBench benchmark. (Which does more than just a simple timed render of a scene file - it also does shaded and wireframe model spins, "fly-throughs" of a 3D scene, etc. to show graphics card and cpu performance, not just rendering times.) CineBench 2003 is available at http://www.maxon.net/jumps/cinebench.html. As with all tests in this review, the desktop was set to 1600x1200 model, millions colors.

CineBench 2003 Results
I also recorded the FPS (frames per second) rate from the scene tests (these are not saved in the results normally). Here's a graph of the FPS rates from the 2 scenes in the Benchmark (results from OpenGL Hardware mode)

CineBench 2003 Scene FPS

XBench Results:
Results from tests using v1.1.3 of XBench.

XBench 1.1.3 Results

The next page has results from real world applications. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page.
(For other cpu upgrade reviews/articles, see the CPU upgrades page)

Giga Designs 1GHz Cube CPU Upgrade Review Pages
Intro | Benchmarks | Apps Tests | Game Tests | Installation | Specs/Design

- or -
Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM

Copyright © 2003.

No part of this sites content or images are to be reproduced or distributed in any form without written permission.
All brand or product names mentioned here are properties of their respective companies.

Users of the web site must read and are bound by the terms and conditions of use.

The Source for Mac Performance News and Reviews
Review: Giga Designs 7455A G4 1GHz Cube CPU Upgrade (2MB L3 SDR Cache) Tested: 12/5/2003
Benchmark Test Results
Intro \| Benchmarks \| Apps Tests \| Game Tests \| Installation \| Specs/Design
Benchmark Tests
Benchmark tests were run with Altivec Fractal Carbon demo 1.2, CineBench 2003, and Xbench 1.1.3. I reboot between all tests (benchmarks and apps/game tests) to ensure as clean/consistent a cache/memory state as possible. Pure benchmarks are far less important than real-world applications tests, but many want to see them regardless. (The Apps tests page has results of tests with iMovie3, iTunes4 , MPEG4 movie conversion and Photoshop 7.0. The game tests page includes results with popular 3D games like Jedi II, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake3.) Fractal FPU Benchmark: I used the freeware Altivec Fractal (Carbon) demo v1.2 program (available here) to compare FPU performance of the original Dual G4/533 system and each of the upgrades. Test run in OS X 10.3.1 (not OS 9). Default settings were used. This is basically a FPU test (Altivec boosted and dual CPU aware). (Note: MegaFlops/sec = Millions of Floating Point Operations per Second.) CineBench 2003 Results: Since probably less than 1% of Mac users own Maxon's Cinema4D application, I use their freely available CineBench benchmark. (Which does more than just a simple timed render of a scene file - it also does shaded and wireframe model spins, "fly-throughs" of a 3D scene, etc. to show graphics card and cpu performance, not just rendering times.) CineBench 2003 is available at http://www.maxon.net/jumps/cinebench.html. As with all tests in this review, the desktop was set to 1600x1200 model, millions colors. I also recorded the FPS (frames per second) rate from the scene tests (these are not saved in the results normally). Here's a graph of the FPS rates from the 2 scenes in the Benchmark (results from OpenGL Hardware mode) XBench Results: Results from tests using v1.1.3 of XBench.
The next page has results from real world applications. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page. (For other cpu upgrade reviews/articles, see the CPU upgrades page)

Giga Designs 1GHz Cube CPU Upgrade Review Pages Intro \| Benchmarks \| Apps Tests \| Game Tests \| Installation \| Specs/Design - or - Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM
Copyright © 2003. No part of this sites content or images are to be reproduced or distributed in any form without written permission. All brand or product names mentioned here are properties of their respective companies. Users of the web site must read and are bound by the terms and conditions of use.