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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.
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.
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?
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
Troll troll troll. Trolls don't use Macs. Trolls seem to prefer beige. They seem to think it's the new grey this season.
Look guys, we know how nice it is to be frugal. Spinster-like, even. But just get off your ass, get a job, and drop the cabbage on a new MDD G4 or even a 12" PBook for crissake! Then you will know what you've been missing. Faster bus, faster RAM, faster processor, it's all you need to blow doors off that beige heap and turn it into an FTP server. Why pay Sonnet 700 clams to eke out more Mhz when you can pay a grand for an eMac which would UNLEASH on that beige G3? Besides, the money just goes right back to Apple to help them make more great machines.
I'm starting to think that MS is paying trolls to sit around and barrage posts about OS X with replies complaining about the speed.
I resent that. I pay the green to keep MS out of my house. If I started let Winows seep in, I'd kick my own ass! The time is going to come, gentlemen when the latest release of OS X will cease to work on your antiques. Why wait? Come on in with the team, and jump in for the big win.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
--cool upgrade man! That scsi fubar is interesting to know, it was worth it to just to read that tip. Did you ever get the video card, max out the ram, and how did it work out if so, and do you still use the machine?