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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.
@$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.
True, but for a good reason: Mac owners tend to get kinda attached to their machines. A CPU upgrade is often the "path of least resistance"; keep the same Mac, same peripherals, same system environment, just speed it up. And it's still cheaper than a new Mac.
I did this myself a few years ago, and didn't regret it at all. Read all about it here if you'd like.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
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.
They may be overpriced, but that doesn't mean they're not cheaper than getting a new machine. What if you have 1GB of RAM? You can't move the memory to the new machine, so you'd have to buy it all over again.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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 !
Yeah, most folk don't seem to realise you can upgrade the mouse to more than one button...
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
I think that the limitation isn't the CPU; it's more likely the graphics card bus. As the AC pointed out in this thread - there's no AGP on the beige G3s or the B&W G3s. In fact, the only thing that B&W G3s have going for them is that the topmost PCI slot is 66MHz instead of 33MHz, which should (in theory) give you a 2x boost in data throughput to the graphics card. That PCI slot was pretty much a stopgap measure for those Macs because Apple didn't have their AGP boards ready at the time (while AGP was just starting to show up on PCs).
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.