From: kanefsky@halcyon.com (Steve Kanefsky)
Subject: Re: Let's talk Performas, Boys and Girls
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 07:06:01 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.011336.19097@cc.umontreal.ca> tsirbasc@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Tsirbas Christos) writes:
>Brian, to address the points you made about my Performa600/IIsi comparison
>
>1): Ever heard of a dual slot adapter which allows one to use a cache or 
>accelerator card and still add a second PDS card.

Not everything is compatable with the dual slot adaptor, and the number
of available cards is very small compared to the number of available
NuBus cards.  Once you go PDS, you give up NuBus completely on the IIsi.

>2)  The Performa 600's direct slot can only support a card with a CPU on it, nota standard cache card, that is why it is called an "accelerator slot"

Even if this is true, it isn't giving up that much.  I'd rather have the
ability to put in a combination accelerator/cache card and not have the
ability to put in a cache-only card than the other way around.  The
ability to have 3 NuBus cards and an accelerator/cache card, plus an
internal CD-ROM drive and a 3.5" half-height hard disk is pretty nice.
The IIsi limits you to a low-profile hard disk if you want any expansion
at all.  Alternately you could put two internal hard disks (including a
5.25" full-height one and a 3.5" half-height one).  So while the IIsi is
currently limited to 240MB of internal disk space, you can fit a couple
gigabytes in the P600.

>3) The Performa can only support a 14" monitor in 16-bit mode, that does not
>constitute built-in support of different monitors.  It constitutes support of
>different colour depths.

I'll take the high-performance VRAM and 16-bit color over pokey 8-bit
color anyday.  If you gotta have a full-page display, I imagine the
NuBus video card would be cheaper than the PDS video card you'd need for 
a IIsi to display 16-bit color (because less VRAM is needed for the
full-page display, and because there is a much bigger market
for NuBus cards, since they work in several different Mac models
instead of just one).  And once again, you're still left with much
better expansion capabilities even if you allow the IIsi two PDS slots.
If you use a NuBus card in the IIsi, you have to eliminate all other
expansion capability and add the cost of the NuBus adaptor.

>4) According to Byte benchmarks of a couple of years ago, the IIsi with its
>20mhz 68030 and no FPU runs at approximately 70% of the speed of a IIsi, the 
>Performa 600 hundred with its 31.33mhz 68030 (which is faster than the IIci's 25mhz) runs at 50-80%, doesn't that tell you something.

Even direct comparisons can be confusing.  Trying to combine the results
of different comparisons by different magazines made years apart is
almost useless.  I think I'll wait for some more results to come in
before I believe the P600 is really that much slower than a IIci.

>5) The IIsi has multiple monitor support two, so there is no difference there 
>withe 600 (by multiple monitor support here, I mean the ability to run 2 or 
>more monitors simultaneously).  The IIsi, however can run a full page monitor 
>out of the box without the need of an additional video-card, so chalk one up 
>for the IIsi.

I think, if you check, the majority of people would rather have 16-bit
color on a 14" monitor than a full-page display, let alone the fact that
the video uses VRAM and doesn't take away from system RAM.  The only
fair comparison is to add a video card to each one, so they are each
running a full-page display *and* a 14" color monitor at 16-bits.  The
P600 costs less to bring up to this capability, you'll have 2
monitors each using VRAM (rather than one with VRAM and one with system
RAM), and you'll be left over with a lot more expansion capability.
So "chalk one up" for the P600.

--
Steve Kanefsky
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware