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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Sonnet Announces New Upgrade for Old Macs 53

Posted by pudge from the old-macs-never-die-they-just-become-expensive-to-upgrade dept.
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.
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Sonnet Announces New Upgrade for Old Macs More

Sonnet Announces New Upgrade for Old Macs

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  • Mac processor upgrades (Score:4, Funny)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @01:55PM (#5738019) Journal
    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.

  • Bus Multiplier? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gryffin ( 86893 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @01:56PM (#5738025) Homepage

    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)

    by nsda's_deviant ( 602648 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @02:00PM (#5738050)
    @$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.
    • Not really, consider this upgrade is for someone using the somethign like the biege G3, circa 1997. Now if you assume that they are still using this machine, and assume the paid $3000 for it, that's close to 6 years already. Tag another $700 and your computer is good to go for at least another 3 years if not longer.
  • You know, every time I talk to a PC user about upgrading Macs and how you actually can do it, I always forget you can upgrade the processor through stuff like this. Oh well.

  • A little too late (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adso ( 469590 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @02:48PM (#5738490)

    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)

      by Mononoke ( 88668 )
      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
      Why not?

      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.

      • Good for you. Do you want a prize, or something?

        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
        • Maybe you are lying so we will think you are cool.
          Maybe I don't give a damn what you think.

          Maybe I was just giving an example of what the machine is capable of.

          • Exactly! I've been running jaguar on my beige G3 266 for months now, and it may not be super speedy, but it is very usable. 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.

            • Re:A little too late (Score:3, Interesting)

              by nycroft ( 653728 )
              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
              • 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!
                Who says I haven't? Currently, my little corner of the universe contains the aforementioned Beige G3, a B&W G3, a last-run CRT iMac, a TiBook, and within 2 days: An LCD iMac.

                Thus, I know what I'm talking about when I discuss the speed of the BeigeG3 running OSX. It ain't bad.

                • Cool. I only have one working computer. *sigh* You win. Lemme get you that prize I was talking about. Now where is that ol' 6100/66?...

                  Look, I'm gonna have to clean this thing up. I'll get back to you.

  • Strange fps scores in games? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TwistedKestrel ( 550054 ) <twistedkestrel@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @02:49PM (#5738493) Journal
    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?
    • 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 A
  • If you invested a heap of $$$ in your Powermac G3 and a heap of high-end peripherals, as some businesses I know have, then the upgrade may be the cheapest solution, where the alternative would be buying everything new. There is also the issue with a number of clients I've had, where they can neither afford the time to set up a new machine, nor risk stuffing around with a mission-critical system. A CPU upgrade is the safest option in these cases, when they need more grunt.

  • Choosy Macs (Score:5, Funny)

    by leviramsey ( 248057 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @03:30PM (#5738824) Journal

    ...Choose ZIF!

  • not such a bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    by heXXXen ( 566121 )
    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 s

  • Aww... That's not old! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @05:51PM (#5739942)
    When I saw Old Mac, I was hoping for something to spruce up my Macintosh LC575 (MC68LC040)!
  • "Mmmmmmm, framerate."

    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)

    by thedbp ( 443047 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @07:39PM (#5740587)
    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.

  • There's also fresh 750FX (G3) CPU ZIF Upgrades! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @08:13PM (#5740787)
    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.

  • I built an awesome PM 9500 server... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PrimeWaveZ ( 513534 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @12:29AM (#5741995)
    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.
  • So what is the likelihood that there will ever be a 970 upgrade path? My Quicksilver is only a year old; it would suck to be left behind in 32-bit land.
    • I wouldn't think that would ever happen. When Apple does release 970 based PowerMacs the motherboard will be an entirely diffrent platform, do I don't think there would be any way to make a 970 work in on a G3 motherboard.
      • I dunno.. There were PPC upgrade cards for many 68k machines. It makes me think it will be a possibility this time around too.
        • The 68k to PPC was 32-bit --> 32bit and made it possible with a few glitches but went relatively well for an arch change.

          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. :)

  • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Its taken months of engineering.....

    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

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