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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).