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

This is the second of a two-part series featuring an Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card upgrade for the PowerMac G4 Cube that lets it run Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard with Core Image in hardware acceleration. In Part I, we covered the Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card and tested its speed in a stock PowerMac G4 Cube against the ATI Rage 128 Pro and Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics cards, two of the three cards that came stock with the PowerMac G4 Cube. Both cards support Core Image in software and the GeForce2 MX also supports QuickTime Extreme but neither support Core Image in hardware acceleration.

As we previously noted, the stock PowerMac G4 Cube with a 450MHz G4 CPU and ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics card does not run Leopard well enough. However, our PowerMac G4 Cube upgraded with a 1.4GHz G4 CPU, Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics card and 1.5GB of RAM runs Leopard very well even though we had to resort to a very simple hack to get it to do so. The upgraded Cube is now our office server running Leopard Server but we used Leopard Client for this test.

When we first installed the Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card in our upgraded Cube running Leopard, it took over three minutes to boot up when it had taken only 40-50 seconds or so previously with the Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics card. We removed the extension "AppleHWSensor.kext" from the System->Library->Extensions folder per a tip posted by a member of The Macintosh Guy's Cube List and the upgraded Cube running Leopard again booted in normal time. We are not sure what other effects may be caused by removing the extension but we've noted none in several days use.

We conducted a series of our graphics speed tests on the ATI Rage 128 Pro and Nvidia GeForce2 MX cards installed in our upgraded Cube, two of three original graphics cards sold with the Cube. Then, 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 9.6 OpenGL Hardware	131	396	868
Let1kwindowsbloom 1.0	21	13	13
Xbench 1.3 Quartz Graphics	33	62	68
Xbench 1.3 OpenGL Graphics	33	71	60
Xbench 1.3 User Interface Graphics	12	33	38
Quake III Arena 1.3.2	--	56	76

Red is fastest.

The Nvidia GeForce 6200 is substantially faster than either stock graphics card on the Cinebench and Quake III Arena tests. Quake III Arena would not even run on the ATI card under Leopard. The 6200 is as fast or faster than the other two cards on all of the other tests except one.

With Core Image hardware acceleration, the Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card works well with our upgraded PowerMac G4 Cube running Leopard. It is reasonably priced at about $100. The tradeoffs are: one needs a bulky ADC/DVI adapter if one has an older Apple monitor with an ADC connector; and one has to install the card without securing it with mounting screws. Neither of these tradeoffs are deal-killers for us. [Bill Fox]