Update: Sonnet Crescendo 604 CPU Upgrade Card -- Not a Keeper?

Dana Baggett, Macs Only!'s Reporter, may be giving up on the Sonnet Crescendo after just two day's use in his Performa 6115. "What has nearly pushed me over the edge is that after writing a simple letter in ClarisWorks 4.0, it wouldn't print properly to my Color StyleWriter 2400 using the 604 CPU. When I turned the Crescendo extension off and rebooted, the letter printed flawlessly using the original 601 CPU. I simply can't afford to spend $400 on a product that does not fully function out of the box. Frankly, I am nervous that I will discover more problems - will it handle MacInTax? I've heard nothing yet from Sonnet support in reply to my three email messages reporting the three problems I have experienced (crash on start up, freeze on shut down, no printing).

My experience with Sonnet's 1 MB L2 cache card alone (i.e. without the Crescendo 604 CPU card and running the original 60 MHz PowerPC 601 chip) is a modest speed boost. The 1 MB L2 cache card yields a MacBench 4.0 processor score of 147 versus 124 with the 256K L2 cache card, nearly a 19% increase. The Crescendo 604 CPU card, with a MacBench 4.0 score of 235 provides another 60% increase."

[Ed. Note: The problems that Dana encountered with Sonnet's Crescendo are very disappointing. Based on the increase in Macs Only!'s traffic yesterday, there appears to be a huge market for souping up older nubus PowerPC Performas and PowerMacs. Let's hope that Sonnet gets the bugs out of Crescendo and that the G3 CPU PDS upgrade cards for nubus PowerMacs announced by NewerTECH and Sonnet (see December 13) will work well--I'm waiting for one for my 7100/80. Today's Accelerate Your Mac! has a note from MacCPU indicating that Newer's CPU cards for the the 6100, 7100 and 8100 will run at 210 and 240 MHz.]