(image courtesy DayStar Digital)
(image courtesy DayStar Digital) |
The Unofficial Turbo 601 SiteThe Turbo 601: A Personal View by
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In 1993 we were looking to buy a Mac to do basic typesetting. At that time, however, the best we could afford was a Mac IIvi which we got at very good price because it had just been discontinued. (Note - the IIvi is a 16 MHz version of the IIvx, it was never sold in the US.) At that time, using System 7.1, the performance was perfectly adequate with our only application, Microsoft Word 5.1.
Things went well with the fledgling part-time business, and by mid-1995 we were using System 7.5.1, PageMaker, PhotoShop, OmniPage and we had also bought an Agfa StudioScan IIsi scanner. To get this lot to run on our IIvi we had taken the plunge and max'd it out with 68M RAM. This had cost a bloody fortune!
Early in 1996 the business expanded again and we started to get a significant volume of freelance book production and prepress work. By now, the IIvi was becoming a serious bottleneck.
What to do? It's still a (very) small business, and we had spent a small fortune on RAM less than 12 months previously. We just couldn't afford to buy a new PowerMac so we decided on a phased upgrade program for the IIvi.
Our next major purchase was a Radius Thunder/24 GT graphics card which we got directly from a supplier in the US for only $369! This made a big difference to the perceived performance of the IIvi - although the processor intensive tasks were still taking the same length of time the fact that the display updated much faster made it feel faster.
Then came the biggie, the purchase of a 100 MHz Turbo 601. This proved to be slightly problematic because when we tried to purchase one we discovered that DayStar had discontinued the Turbo 601 for the IIvi. We got in touch with DayStar however, explained the situation, and after a few weeks they managed to send a 100 MHz Turbo 601 directly to us (thanks Cathy!).
After installing the Turbo 601 the difference was stunning! The scanning software we use, Agfa's FotoLook, is particularly processor intensive and interpolated line-art scans, for example, are now around 8-10 times faster than they were. We can OCR three or four times the amount we used to be able to do in the same time. PageMaker and PhotoShop are now responsive applications! Since installing the Turbo 601 we find that we are completing the typesetting and graphics origination work on a typical book in less than a third of the time we used to.
We have just completed the final stage of our planned series of upgrades to the IIvi, and have recently installed an FWB JackHammer SCSI accelerator.
We now have a Mac that we're extremely pleased with, it's responsive, quite fast, and is no longer a frustration to work with. But the harsh reality is that it's probably only just slightly faster than a 6100/66, an early and now very low-end PowerMac. In addition, if you total what we've spent on the Mac IIvi during the last two years we could have bought a much higher spec'd more recent PowerMac. But the thing is we just couldn't do it that way - we didn't have the resources to do it all at once - and we were determined that the business would pay for the Mac upgrades when it could afford them.
So we're very happy with Turbo 601 - in our setup it works extremely well and it's made an enormous difference to our work-flow. But I reckon it works so well only because we've invested heavily to improve the graphics and SCSI sub-systems in our IIvi.
My main criticism of the Turbo 601 must, therefore, be it's price. The 100 MHz version still costs $1,199 - virtually the same price it was when it was introduced in Jan 1995. This, combined with the fact that you really need to upgrade the graphics and SCSI sub-systems and physical RAM to take full advantage of the potential performance benefits indicates to me that it's grossly over-priced. I reckon if DayStar could sell the Turbo 601 for (say) $500, they'd shift much greater numbers of them than they have up until now. I reckon there is still a sizable demand for a product of this nature, if it's affordable.
Then there's the support issue, but I reckon that what this web site's all about...!