Both currently available

People love their Macs. It may be a love-hate relationship, but there's still a whole lotta lovin' going on. When their Macs get long of tooth and start feeling a bit pokey, Mac users are loath to replace their old machines. They usually would much prefer to upgrade it as far as is possible rather than send their old machine to Macintosh heaven. And that's where we come in. In this article, we take a look at two upgrades for PCI Power Macintoshes. We ran a Newer Technology MAXpowr G3 466/233 (henceforth called the MAXpowr 466) and a XLR8 450 MHz MACh Carrier G3 (dubbed the Carrier 450, for short) through their paces to see who has the tastier biscuits.

We compare compatibility issues, features, bundle and performance, as usual, from the gamer's perspective. When we ran our benchmarks, we came upon some startling results that forced us to ask the underlying question: Should you really upgrade your old Mac or is it better to replace it with a new one? We'll get to that later in the article when we look at benchmarks. We will start with a closer look at the two upgrades: the MAXpowr 466 and the Carrier 450.

An important issue to consider when thinking about upgrading your PowerMac is compatibility. If you have after market hardware, you need to check with the makers to make sure that they are compatible with G3 upgrades. And if you have older software that is no longer updated, you should also make sure that it is compatible with G3 upgrades. Also, check with Newer Technology and XLR8 about compatibility with the hardware you have. While both products are compatible with almost everything, in some rare instances, it is possible to find that upgrades are not even an option. Speed and features do not matter when your machine will not boot. The major issue of G3 upgrade compatibility has to do with speculative processing.