Sonnet Announces New Upgrade for Old Macs 53
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.
Mac processor upgrades (Score:4, Funny)
Overpriced processor upgrades have a long and rich tradition on Macs.
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [dyndns.org] if you'd like.
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:2)
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mac processor upgrades (Score:2)
Bus Multiplier? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
$700 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:$700 (Score:2)
I always forget about these (Score:1)
Re:I always forget about these (Score:1)
Re:I always forget about these (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I always forget about these (Score:1)
Re:I always forget about these (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I always forget about these (Score:2)
A little too late (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:A little too late (Score:2, Informative)
I'm running 10.2.5 on an overclocked 233MHz beige, and it runs just fine. Not incredibly snappy, but I still get work done on it.
Re:A little too late (Score:3, Funny)
Look, everybody's machine is different. EveryBODY is different. Maybe you have good luck. Maybe you are lying so we will think you are cool. Wait, lemme try:
I'm running 10.3.8 on my over-clocked 66Mhz PowerMac 6100, and it works great. I'm running Photoshop filters all over the place AND I'm rendering thousands of frames of video. Anyone who buys another new machine is stupid. Yak yak quacky quack smack!
See how easy that was? It's not snappy, but it mak
Re:A little too late (Score:1)
Maybe I was just giving an example of what the machine is capable of.
Re:A little too late (Score:1)
Re:A little too late (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:A little too late (Score:1)
Thus, I know what I'm talking about when I discuss the speed of the BeigeG3 running OSX. It ain't bad.
Re:A little too late (Score:2)
Look, I'm gonna have to clean this thing up. I'll get back to you.
Strange fps scores in games? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Strange fps scores in games? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you've invested big $$$ in your Mac already... (Score:1)
Re:If you've invested big $$$ in your Mac already. (Score:2)
Re:If you've invested big $$$ in your Mac already. (Score:2)
Re:If you've invested big $$$ in your Mac already. (Score:2)
Re:If you've invested big $$$ in your Mac already. (Score:2)
Choosy Macs (Score:5, Funny)
...Choose ZIF!
not such a bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Aww... That's not old! (Score:3, Funny)
Don't you mean....... (Score:2)
Don't you mean framerates? I mean I know the platforms framerates arent all that but even my imac g3 400 gets more than _one_.
Been waiting on this ... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
There's also fresh 750FX (G3) CPU ZIF Upgrades! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I built an awesome PM 9500 server... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Any hopes for 970 upgrades? (Score:2)
Re:Any hopes for 970 upgrades? (Score:1)
Re:Any hopes for 970 upgrades? (Score:2)
Re:Any hopes for 970 upgrades? (Score:1)
32bit --> 64bit isn't going to be pretty if you try to convert existing hardware. The data path(s) would be huge bottlenecks (shoving 64bit through 32bit pathways) if it could be made to work at all. It wouldn't be worth all the headaches to attmpt this but I'm sure someone will try it anyway.
How did they do it? (Score:2)
This is significant - this is the first time anyone has promised a 745x G4 upgrade for Blue & White G3 PowerMacs - and thus the first time there's been a G4 for B&Ws faster than a 500 or 550 MHz 7400 (PowerLogix has a 550 MHz G4 ZIF but it comes with the cost of slower cache). This is a long time coming; but keep in mind that the product is only "expected in coming weeks" - so far it's still vapor.
At MacWorld New York last year Sonnet announced a few products, none of them for B&W G3s. I was
Its taken months of engineering..... Hurray (Score:1, Insightful)
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