Friday, March 30, 200l

XLR8, the leading manufacturer of Macintosh upgrade and expansion products, today posted a performance enhancing cache utility for Mac OS X, MACh Speed Control X™.

XLR8 has released MACh Speed Control X™ due to overwhelming requests from customers for Mac OS X cache control software. 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 at www.xlr8.com.

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..." stated Jack Kolk, VP and general manager of XLR8. "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 enabling simply by visiting the XLR8 web 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."