[WinMac] Re: Usable speed of Virtual PC on G3?

Derek K. Miller [at Home](dkmiller[at]pobox.com)
Tue, 04 Aug 1998 22:51:44 -0800

Mike wrote:
>I'm thinking of selling my Power Mac 8500/120 w/ 100 MhZ pentium card and
>buying a Powerbook G3/250 and using Virtual PC 2.0 for doing windows
>development. So far, I've been satisfied with the speed of my 100MHz
>pentium card, and was wondering if anyone had any experience with serious
>use of Virtual PC on a G3 machine. MacWeek published some benchmarks a few
>weeks ago from which I'm guestimating that VPC/G3 would be about as fast as
>my Pentium/100 card...

Maybe not quite (depending on your application), but pretty close, at
least, and maybe better.

I use VPC on both my G3/266 desktop (with 512K backside cache) and a
SuperMac C600/200 at work (with 256K cache). Connectix says cache is
very important for VPC performance, and there is certainly a
noticeable difference between the C600 and the G3, more than I would
even expect from the 603e/750 processor speed alone -- the SuperMac
runs Win 95 much like I would guess a 486/25 or 486/33 would (barely
acceptably), and the G3 is quite spunky -- not far off my P133 at
work.

As far as I recall, the PowerBook G3/250 has 1MB of backside cache, so
it will probably perform even better than my G3 desktop, despite the
slower clock speed.

I'd advise a good amount of RAM in your PowerBook (64MB at least) for
best performance. And I'd avoid anything _really_ taxing, such as
Photoshop, which you should run in the Mac OS anyway, but anything
below that should work pretty well. I think Visual InterDev would even
do fine.

I manage to run VPC 2.0 with Word 6.0, Visual SourceSafe 5.0, Internet
Explorer 3.0, and Maximizer 5.0 (my company's product), including
heavy Novell network and Internet traffic -- sometimes all
simultaneously -- on the C600, and though it's a bit of a slug, I
wouldn't hesitate using a G3 for those tasks, even preferentially to a
lower-end PC desktop. Benchmarks may say different(ly), but a G3
running VPC 2.0 certainly feels pretty snappy, and that's often what
counts. If you're not doing absolutely monstrous code builds, it
should be good enough, I think.

John Santora wrote:
>The biggest potential problem you could have is the fixed screen resolution
>of a PB. It's 1024x768, so if you do a lot of development at 640x480 or
>800x600, you'll have a smaller image in a window, or a full-screen with a
>black border all around. Doesn't bother me (I run Win95 at 800x600x256
>colors), but it may be an issue if you want to see things "full size."

You can always use an external monitor when possible.

--
Derek K. Miller <dkmiller@pobox.com>
Writer, Editor & Web Guy




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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Aug 04 1998 - 23:09:23 PDT