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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.
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?
...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)!
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.
I can't imagine why. Overclocking a PC CPU by 25% 5 years ago would be considered "standard" and 50% gains like those in the venerable Celeron with standard cooling was nothing exceptional.
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
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.
Yeah, most folk don't seem to realise you can upgrade the mouse to more than one button...
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