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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.
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.
...Choose ZIF!