Blast from the Past--Leopard Core Image on a PowerMac G4 Cube--Part I

Face it, there is no Mac like a PowerMac G4 Cube--we'd write that there is no computer like a PowerMac G4 Cube but that's the same thing. We bought one of the first ones shipped in August 2000 and now we have almost three, the "almost" being a nearly complete collection of spare parts. One is completely stock and the second is highly upgraded. At least one will always live on in service as long as we are using computers.

We have used the stock 450MHz Cube as our office server through Tiger but it won't run Leopard well enough so its day is done. We have replaced it with our upgraded 1.4GHz Cube which runs Leopard surprisingly well as we previously noted. It was our main desktop machine until its upgraded Geforce3 graphics card could no longer handle our favorite 3D games. We retired it, temporarily it turns out, and sold the GeForce3 card. Its original stock GeForce2 MX graphics card handles Quartz Extreme but not Leopard's Core Image graphics.

As luck would have it, The Macintosh Guy's Cube List member "Riba" mentioned that Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics cards with 256MB VRAM that have been "flashed" to run on Macs are available on eBay for a reasoable price--search "Cube 6200". Many Nvidia GeForce 6200 cards easily fit into a Cube and support Leopard's Core Image graphics. Woohoo! We ordered one from "local338" for $95 which includes express mail shipping from Hong Kong.

Our flashed 6200 arrived in a few days. It has a fan when we expected only a heat sink. It turns out that we did not pay careful enough attention when we ordered. There is a fanless 6200 for only $5 more. Anyway, the upgraded Cube has a fan to cool the faster CPU and the 6200 adds little noise--it's about like our MacBook Pro's fan. Be careful to get one of the low profile cards that do not require moving the Cube's VRM board.

To install the 6200 we had to remove the port bracket (or fence). Unfortunately, the stock Cube port bracket of the GeForce2 MX does not fit the 6200 without taking a Bremel tool to it which we did not want to do. So we installed the 6200 without a bracket as others have done with an ATI Radeon 7500 or other cards. If you don't move the Cube around much, this workaround is okay. The 6200 does not have an ADC port, only DVI and VGA ports, so we had to use an Apple DVI to ADC adapter to connect it to our aging 17" Apple Cinema Display.

First, we installed it in our stock Cube running Tiger 10.4.11 after conducting a series of our graphics speed tests on the ATI Rage 128 Pro and Nvidia GeForce2 MX cards, two of three original graphics cards sold with the Cube. We repeated the tests with the 6200 installed. Here are the results:

Graphics Cards Speed Tests (Higher Score is Faster except Let1kwindowsbloom)

Test	ATI Rage 128 Pro	GeForce2 MX	GeForce 6200
.
Cinebench 9.5 OpenGL Hardware	106	103	401
Let1kwindowsbloom 1.0	30	26	27
Xbench 1.2 Quartz Graphics	24	23	25
Xbench 1.2 OpenGL Graphics	50	39	26
Xbench 1.2 User Interface Graphics	10	10	10
Quake III Arena 1.3.2	34	43	41

The Nvidia GeForce 6200 is generally as fast or faster than the other two cards but the differences are not impressive except in the Cinebench OpenGL Hardware Lighting test, one of the more reliable speed tests. Curiously, the 6200 is slower in Xbench's OpenGL test than the ATI Rage.

But we bought the Nvidia GeForce 6200 card to run Leopard in our upgraded Cube because it supports Leopard's Core Image. It runs great with Leopard and we'll post the results of those tests in Part II. [Bill Fox]