Hi,
The 400 MHz cards were never sold to the public, but I did see some when I worked in a university back in the day. They were in 8600s that came directly from Apple right before the beige PowerMac G3s came out.
If you need a CPU card, I have a few extra 604ev cards. I might even have a 350 MHz. PM me if you're interested.
To answer your question, the 350 MHz or the 400 MHz have to be the best 604 cards. They have 1 meg of 100 MHz L2 cache, and since the 604ev required a different ROM, nobody made accelerators with them. The G3s are slower when you measure instructions per clock, especially at floating point, but the much faster L2 cache usually makes them faster all around, plus they're available at higher clock speeds. Remember the Pentium on a snail commercials?
The G4s are closer to the 604s when it comes to both integer (instructions per clock) and floating point performance. Since a 1 GHz Sonnet Crescendo G4 can be bought for $100 USD, that would obviously give you the most bang for the buck for any 8600 or 9600. I have one in my colocated 9600 server and it's wonderful. It's fast and it's as stable as everything else in that system, which is to say it is perfectly stable.
The 350 MHz cards are often easily overclocked to 400 MHz.
John
The 400 MHz cards were never sold to the public, but I did see some when I worked in a university back in the day. They were in 8600s that came directly from Apple right before the beige PowerMac G3s came out.
If you need a CPU card, I have a few extra 604ev cards. I might even have a 350 MHz. PM me if you're interested.
To answer your question, the 350 MHz or the 400 MHz have to be the best 604 cards. They have 1 meg of 100 MHz L2 cache, and since the 604ev required a different ROM, nobody made accelerators with them. The G3s are slower when you measure instructions per clock, especially at floating point, but the much faster L2 cache usually makes them faster all around, plus they're available at higher clock speeds. Remember the Pentium on a snail commercials?
The G4s are closer to the 604s when it comes to both integer (instructions per clock) and floating point performance. Since a 1 GHz Sonnet Crescendo G4 can be bought for $100 USD, that would obviously give you the most bang for the buck for any 8600 or 9600. I have one in my colocated 9600 server and it's wonderful. It's fast and it's as stable as everything else in that system, which is to say it is perfectly stable.
The 350 MHz cards are often easily overclocked to 400 MHz.
John