XLR8, a manufacturer of Macintosh upgrade and expansion products, has unveiled the MACh Speed Control X, a performance enhancing cache utility.
“We have released MACh Speed Control X due to overwhelming requests from our customers for Mac OS X cache control software,” said Jack Kolk, vice president and general manager of XLR8. “The installer will enable the backside cache to be run at 2:1 on all Macs upgraded with XLR8 upgrades and is available free of charge from the XLR8 Web site.”
The supported upgrades include the MACh Velocity MPe, MACh Speed G3 and G4, MACh Carrier and Carrier ZIF families of processor upgrade cards.
“There is tremendous immediate interest and demand to evaluate Mac OS X on all the platforms that Apple supports and beyond,” Kolk added in a statement. “We decided that nothing was gained by users experiencing extremely slow performance upon installing OS X in their machine simply because the cache was not being optimized. This software turns on the backside cache establishing normal operation. It’s that simple.”
Users can register to receive the XLR8 MACh Speed Control X backside cache by cruising on over to the XLR8 site. To make use of the utility users must have already installed Mac OS X and be running the software when they launch the installer. The new XLR8 MACh Speed Control X utility will work with all third party processor upgrades providing they have at least 1MB of backside cache that is capable of running at a ratio of 2:1 (all XLR8 upgrades faster than a G3 300 with 1MB of backside cache are capable of running at 2:1). Users who have purchased other brands of processor upgrade should ensure that they have high specification cache before installing the utility.
“Not only have we fully enabled the cache on Beige G3, Blue & White and Graphite machines,” stated Chris Cooksey, Director of Engineering at XLR8, “but due to demand we have also included support for the pre-G3 machines as well. Although these machines are not supported by Apple it seems a large number of people have been successful in getting OS X to install and run on the un-supported machines — we wanted these people to get the best possible experience, hence this new release.”
Earlier this week, XLR8 pledged support for the new operating system. With XLR8 power users can upgrade to G4 today with the MACh Speed G4 ZIF MPe install and run Mac OS X straight out of the box with no further software required, according to Cooksey. At a later date users will be able to step up to multi-processing using the recently announced MACh Velocity G4 MPe 66 upgrade (for beige G3 systems), he added. All XLR8 upgrades will install and run under OS X in machines that are officially supported by Apple.
“Mac OS X automatically enables the backside cache at 2:1,” Cooksey said. “All XLR8 cards support 2:1 caches. We are one of the few vendors that have done this universally, so customers can rest-assured that their upgrade will get the maximum performance even without additional software. Users with MACh Speed G4 ZIF MPe upgrades will therefore be able to take advantage of the power of Mac OS X today.”