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Sonnet Announces New Upgrade for Old Macs
Hrvat writes "In a somewhat surprising move, Sonnet Technology announced the release of a 1GHz G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) upgrade for the old Beige G3s. Since the old G4 ZIF upgrades maxed out at 500mhz (and they were compatible with Beige G3, Blue and White G3 and the PCI graphics G4), this is a huge jump. The upgrade is pricey, though ($700) and I am not sure that I am willing to dish out that kind of cash just for a processor upgrade."
Update: 04/15 19:15 GMT by J : In related news, here's a
review
of three non-ZIF CPU upgrades,
at Inside Mac Games. For what it's worth, last month I bought Sonnet's
1.2 GHz CPU
for my AGP Power Mac, easy install, it's working fine so far. Mmmmmm, framerate.
The upgrade is pricey, though ($700) and I am not sure that I am willing to dish out that kind of cash just for a processor upgrade."
Overpriced processor upgrades have a long and rich tradition on Macs.
May we never see th
Hmm, I wonder how they managed this... I thought the G4 buss multiplier maxed out at 10x or so. Maybe they added an extra clock, synced to the main bus clock but running twice as fast, so that the CPU sees the 66MHz system bus as 133MHz?
Sonnet's a good company. Their products are rock solid. I just wish they'd come out with a dual G4 like PowerLogix. Competition is good!
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
@$700 its a bit steep, especially with the given difficulty or running OS X it would probablly be cheaper to buy a Power Mac for double that and let it depreciate over 3-5 years rather than invest in a (quite old) G3 Beige. Sonnet is really grabbing at tiny scraps with this upgrade, I'd like to see the benchmarks for this especially when the mobo architecture and faster ram on the new G4s benefit the speed of OS X over sheer processor speed.
You know, every time I talk to a PC user about upgrading Macs and how you actually can do it, I always forget you can upgrade the processor through stuff like this. Oh well.
My beige G3 has been a dependable workhorse for years now, but the memory is maxed, the PCI slots are full, and I will never be able to adequately run OS X on it (not to mention that without AGP, video upgrades have come to a dead stop). I believe a lot of beige G3 owners are in the same boat, and I can't really think people are going to jump at an upgrade that costs half of what a new G4 tower would be, especially when there are so many other bottlenecks to speed (a 66 mHz system bus being one) on the old machines.
But what the hell do I know? I've been waiting to replace that thing with a G5, and it was a pretty zippy machine way back when I made that decision.
I can't help but find the cost/megahertz and cost/fps charts a little hilarious :P.
More importantly, though, is the fact that the games score nearly exactly the same score, no matter what the resolution! In PC land, this points to an under-fed video card, and a bottleneck in either (a) the CPU or (b) whatever bus the video card is attached to. These things are running 1.2 GHz chips, so I think I can assume that the bottle neck is not in the CPU. Might one surmise from this that Apple has a fairly slow AGP implementation? Or is it that the Radeon 8500 isn't playing nice with the AGP on the G4?
Any explanations?
If you invested a heap of $$$ in your Powermac G3 and a heap of high-end peripherals, as some businesses I know have, then the upgrade may be the cheapest solution, where the alternative would be buying everything new. There is also the issue with a number of clients I've had, where they can neither afford the time to set up a new machine, nor risk stuffing around with a mission-critical system. A CPU upgrade is the safest option in these cases, when they need more grunt.
What is the point of the internet?
...Choose ZIF!
In response to those saying to "just buy a new machine" instead of upgrading: Upgrades are not such a bad idea, especially for people like me who don't need an AGP slot. I have a Radeon PCI Mac Edition using the Quartz Extreme hack and OS 10.2 is very fast. I have a B&W G3 upgraded to a G4 500mhz, and after the price drops a few hundred dollars, I will certainly look at getting a 1ghz+ cpu. Some may argue that the memory bus is slow on older macs, well, after reading some reviews/benchmarks, I can safely conclude that any speed increases apple has done to their bus over 100mhz have not improved performance all that much. The DDR based macs perform exactly the same (Actually, slightly less) than their SDR counterparts. Even the SDR jump to 133mhz is negligible. Games don't matter much to me, as I, being a very open minded slashdotter, run many operating systems on many different platforms, one of which beings Windows on x86. Besides, there is no Battlefield 1942 for Mac :D !
When I saw Old Mac, I was hoping for something to spruce up my Macintosh LC575 (MC68LC040)!
"Mmmmmmm, framerate."
Don't you mean framerates? I mean I know the platforms framerates arent all that but even my imac g3 400 gets more than _one_.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I use a beige mac as the hub of my digital entertainment center. EVERYTHING goes through the mac, from DVD to TV to MP3 and CD to DivX and more. Pumped through a Radeon 7000 into a 27" TV and a second 14" VGA for system and file maintenance. all controlled through a Keyspan remote.
it works fine now, running at G4 466, but yummmmm that 1GHz sounds good. but, yes, way too pricey for what i'd be using it for. the lack of agp graphics makes these macs incompatible with a lot of advanced features and applications, notably Quartz Extreme and DVD Studio Pro to name a couple.
I'd gladly pay $500 for this upgrade, and I'm sure the price will come down.
Oh, and didn't any of you know you can clock the bus speed of your beige up to 83 MHz? it runs very stable and allows you to get a faster L2 cache in the process. check out www.xlr8yourmac.com!!!
The 66->83 thing really helps a bunch.
Don't forget that there's also an 800MHz G3 chip (based on the 750FX) for those of us who don't need Altivec (server folks, mostly).
PowerLogix has managed to get the latest (last?) of the G3s onto a ZIF for us. I can't wait to get this cool-running power-efficient CPU under the hood of my server. It has an integrated 512K full-speed cache instead of a backside cache (big but slower).
The G3 is a great chip for Linux servers and workstations that don't do video-editing or use AltiVec extensively.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Is it that hard to unplug the peripherals and plug them back into a new machine? OS 9 to OS X software upgrades I can understand.
If you have old, high end peripherals with legacy ports, it can be a problem. SCSI, ADB, those old round serial ports. Some can be worked around with USB adapters, but those are rarely problem-free.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
It's down right now because of some as-yet unresolved OS update issues with 10.2.5, but I have to say that I love CPU upgrades.
I would not pay that much money for one, personally, but there are a lot of people who would. I know a guy who runs Final Cut 1.2.5 or so on a B/W G3 that could certainly benefit from the G4 upgrade (although I don't believe FCP 1 is AltiVec-friendly.) His system is rock-solid and he will not move to another machine for a while. It has worked perfectly for years, and even though he is putting his new DP G4 tower through trials, a speedup in his current setup makes a lot of financial sense.
It is definitely not for everyone, but that doesn't mean it is totally useless. Although, I know a lot of people will buy them just to say "Yeah, I've got a blue Mac that tops 1 GHz." Hehe.
So what is the likelihood that there will ever be a 970 upgrade path? My Quicksilver is only a year old; it would suck to be left behind in 32-bit land.
That is stuff from 3 generations ago. Decision was made years ago to avoid the upgrade path. Although SCSI is far from legacy... still rips over IDE... ;)
This is significant - this is the first time anyone has promised a 745x G4 upgrade for Blue & White G3 PowerMacs - and thus the first time there's been a G4 for B&Ws faster than a 500 or 550 MHz 7400 (PowerLogix has a 550 MHz G4 ZIF but it comes with the cost of slower cache). This is a long time coming; but keep in mind that the product is only "expected in coming weeks" - so far it's still vapor.
At MacWorld New York last year Sonnet announced a few products, none of them for B&W G3s. I was there and I pestered the Sonnet booth people about this. They told me two things: B&W G3s are the largest untapped market for Mac CPU upgrades which they would of course love to have better offerings in, and that they couldn't comment on anything other than an announced product. I took this to mean that if it was feasible to put a 7450 in a B&W, they'd be selling one by now. A few months later I eBayed myself a Sonnet G4/500 ZIF, figuring I needed something to make my G3/400 B&W last until I could get a 970/G5 Mac from Apple (IMHO the current Apple G4 offerings are pretty lame with their underpowered bus and slow clock speeds, not to mention lack of modernized disk and expansion interfaces).
I've heard allusions to the possibility that the power requirements of a 7450 are too great for the PCI Motherboard and Power Supply used in the Yosemite/Yikes systems. [BTW, clock/bus ratio is not an issue, you can get a 10x ratio on a G4 and with a 100MHz bus there's plenty of room for more than 500MHz] I don't really understand this technically: my machine has enough juice to power 4-5 drives and 4 PCI cards, but it can't handle a faster processor? I'm hoping someone would like to comment on what the technical limitation was that made these upgrades take so long to come out, and how Sonnet plans to overcome them.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
SCSI is legacy because it used to be standard on all Macs from the Mac Plus on up to the Beige G3's, but is now only an option on the tower cases.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Its taken months of engineering.....
more so than any of the many amazing technologies Ben Macaelian out in Kansas (the main ex-Newer Technologies firmware enigineer, and lead at Sonnet on this project probably) have ever been created. I do not know how much Ben worked on this one, but he typically does the bulk of all the hardest projects in the Mac universe. His are usually done rather quickly, so I do not know if this started out or was assigned to him. (Sonnet bought a few mac accelerator companies and retained a few of their engineers in varous places around the country).
Countless amazing upgrades have been created by Newer Technologies (before bought by Sonnet) and many more afterwards such as iMac accelerators *with full speed Firewire), "Wallstreet G3" accelerators that really work (unlike competition), and much more.
Sonnet/Newer upgrades have always been rock solid, "usually needding no special extension", fully compatible, and able to "sleep-wakeup".
(On macintoshes in some versions of the OS, the motherboard power and pci can be shut down 100%, in other cases just the cache is shut down, or in some cases the cpu clock is slowed down) Those are the technologies that always make these upgrades much much much harder than the older upgrades.
And Apple having sometime 5, to 9 serious bugs in the firmware to locate and fix do not make it any bettter. Usually hardware design is needed to overcome those defects.
Its voodoo.
But Sonnet has workedvery very hardto take the time to do this one.... and it opens the door for almost ANY newcpu to be easily added to Blue&White G3 and beige macs (in fact the same part SKU is planned... and tath is even more voodoo whichcraft if you know anything about the sockets.
This achievement is so amazing it boggles the mind, but the sad part is that it took the engineering resources that normally could have been used for 4 or 5 other average projects.
It is also the only time you have ever seen such a news release on Slashdot.
The reason? This achievement is newsworthy. Competitors to Sonnet said it was "physically IMPOSSIBLE" in fact.... it should have been, and might be.... but I trust that if its 95% complete and Sonnet issued a press release... then it looks like the last hurdle is hopped and their resident overworked genious can get some rest (he knows every detail of every aspect of the bootup of all macs and learned it all through thousands of hours of debugging and dissassembly, but even this ).
I would buy this in a heartbeat when it comes out. Those macs have ADB and honor the ADB in interrupts (good for real debugging) and do not have to rely on polled-mode crap usb while debugging on a single machine. Those macs are IDEAL for product development of systems level code. The newest Mirror Drive Door macs Apple sells today cannot be used for programming and are the first macs in over 17 years that lack a NMI interrupt debugger switch. This is known as a "programmers switch" "programmers interrupt switch". You press it when the mac is frozen and then if your debugger memory is not overwritten (rare) and you are not in a pci level 1 primary interrrupt (very rare), then you can use your instlled debugger of choice to solve any crashing bug. Without a debugger switch you cannot debug code on the macs made since October 2002 unless you steal parts from an older G4 and swap IC parts on a remote circuit board AFTER the machine is booted, sometimes even that hot swap hangs the machine. Hurray for the B+W G3 and beige models... programmers dream machines.