G4 Digital Audio 533 Questions...

I'm sure it will be plenty fast. My 500mhz iBook G3 is nice and quick on tiger with only 320mb of RAM. A nice price too!

heh, you picked up the same system i have. you will not see a slow UI period wit this.

mine is a 533mhz, 512mb, 40GB HDD, Geforce 2 MX 32mb vram AGP 4x. 10/100/1000baset ethernet. built in option for wifi ( not installed). mine has a DVD ROM drive as well.

i am planning to buy ram either from OWC, or DMS. make sure you get CL2.2.2 PC133 and not the slower CL3.2.2 PC133or CL3.3.3 PC133 ram. yes it will be $4-$5 more per stick but i think its worth the extra.

the 6200 might do good for you, i have seen allot of complaints about the performance of them, but they was installed in cubes (they have 2x AGP vs the 4x AGP in DA G4)

here is my plan for mine.

Fastmac dual 7455 1.4ghz upgeade

eVGA 6800 GT

120GB HDD

1.5GB ram

airport card (i dont know what all version can go into it)

and a CD/DVD combo burner ( i will stick with Pioneer DVR seres)

but yea you will not see a slow GUI at all, VLC play's real great on it. halo even runs on it

this thing will run circles around my AIO and Yikes 400 in everything with ease

I have a 466MHz G4 Digital Audio and I can tell you that it is more than powerful enough to run Tiger well. Mine has 768MB of RAM but if you can find 512MB PC133 sticks you can upgrade as far as 1.5GB. 512MB or over is sufficient for using Tiger effectively. There are three RAM slots, mine has 256MB in each, and 256MB PC133 sticks are quite easy to find cheaply these days (I got mine from scrap PIII PCs).

Incidentally my G4 still has the stock Rage 128 Pro (16MB VRAM) card and it is fine for pretty much all basic tasks under Tiger. It does occasionally struggle a little with rendering high-quality video but this doesn't cause me much trouble.

The Digital Audio G4's still have alot of life left in them and will possibly be able to run Leopard when it finally comes out. Tiger is by far the fastest version of OS X you can run on them and the DA will behave basically like a modern machine.

I have a 533 with 896megs and a flashed Radeon 9700 and it runs Tiger just fine.

Mine's still in pieces, but I picked up a pretty cheap dual 533 CPU module from olde mac milt - it was about $70 including shipping to Australia.

Thanks all for the reports. I'm typing this out on the machine right now, and it's pretty nice under 10.2. It has 384 megs of RAM, and I'll install Tiger once I drop another 512MB stick in it.

tiger ran on my Yikes G4 with 256mb ( it was a little bit slow) allot of disk swapping. i later put 384mb in it and was much faster. but 512mb is the bare minimum i would go to have a good tiger experience ( really that isn't enough to satisfy tigers thirst for ram)

Just as an update - I installed the RAM (for 896MB total), put in a Sony DVD burner, and installed 10.4. It's awesome. I'm amazed by how well the thing performs, given its age. I'm not even bothering flashing my GeForce 6200 - the GeForce 2 MX is just fine.

I'm so impressed that it's now my main box - replacing my Ubuntu Athlon 2400+ machine. Eventually I'll drop a faster or dual G4 daughtercard in this, but for the time being 533MHz is just fine. Amazing that I 'downgraded' from 2GHz and am just as happy.

Thanks all for your input! I'm sure I'll have more questions as time goes on....

the GeForce 2 MX isn't bad but but lacks a few features the 6200 has. the 6200 supports both QE (quarts extreme) and CI (core image) wile the GF2MX only supports QE.

i also think the 6200 might even give a bit of a performance boost when compared to the GF2MX. but the 6200 is a low end card of the Geforce 6 series cards

Thanks for the heads up madmax. What is it that core image does for me?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/

Hmm...for some reason that link doesn't work for me. But I did some searching and learned about it. I wonder if it'll make a noticable difference for me?

yea, it will help out. and will make a noticeable difference

what QE and CI do is offload those things to the GFX card and free up the cpu to do other things

It looks like Apple updated the site when they made the Leopard announcement and deleted the Core Image page.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/coreanimation.html

thats Apple for ya

web archive might have it

EDIT yep they do

web archive Apple coreimage

I tried checking the wayback machine, it was taking forever to load so I just posted the Core Animation link instead since it is related to Core Image.

yea web archive is like that most of the times

Thanks all!

I now have the 6200 successfully running in this thing. Flashing and taping up the pins didn't take long at all, and worked like a charm. Profiler is now reporting that both QE and CI is supported.

Next up is a processor upgrade and a SATA card for a fast, large hard drive. But those don't have to happen right away - the system is plenty usable as it is.

Very cool!

Wait ...

for $20

Click to expand...

8-o

Wait ...

for $20

Click to expand...

8-o

Click to expand...

Yeah - I wasn't even looking for a G4, and when I saw this one, I jumped on it. It had 384 megs installed, and for another 15 bucks I got an additional 512 meg stick. So for less than 50 bucks invested, I had a pretty usable 10.4 machine.

But I'm about to drop the hammer on a high dollar item - a better processor card. The high clock rate duals are still pretty expensive. It looks like I'll be spending close to $400 for a dual 1.6. Or I can spend $250 on a single 1.5. I can't make up my mind whether the dual processors will really help me enough to justify the $$$. I don't number crunch much - it's mostly day to day tasks on this thing.

So I now have a single 1.5GHz 7455B processor in the machine, and what a difference! I went with the single processor mainly because the duals are more than I wanted to invest in an aging machine, and the extra cache on the 7455 made me think that it'd actually perform a little better than a dual 1.6GHz 7447A for tasks not suited to multiprocessing.

Anyway - it's a pretty sweet upgrade - I'll post some benchmarks soon.

im running tiger on my pismo with only 384mb ram, and it runs pretty good!

So I now have a single 1.5GHz 7455B processor in the machine, and what a difference! I went with the single processor mainly because the duals are more than I wanted to invest in an aging machine, and the extra cache on the 7455 made me think that it'd actually perform a little better than a dual 1.6GHz 7447A for tasks not suited to multiprocessing.
Anyway - it's a pretty sweet upgrade - I'll post some benchmarks soon.

Click to expand...

are you going to use xbench 1.3 ??

i did mine, here is the result in almost stock config

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=246160

its allot faster then what i thought the system was going to be ( before i got it). once i get the upgrades i can only think on how much more faster its going to be. i am going to opt for the dual 7455's at 1.4ghz

Yes - xbench 1.3!

Here are the results:

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=249289&doc2=1&setCookie=true

Yes - xbench 1.3!
Here are the results:

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=249289&doc2=1&setCookie=true

Click to expand...

bigD,

It looks like you got about a 2x performance boost over madmax_2069's numbers.

David

very nice speed boost, over stock.

i will be getting a dual 7455 1.4ghz cpu upgrade and a 6800 GT video card and 1.5gb ram . but will post on each upgrade i add.

but it seems that the 6200 plus the upgrade gave a very nice result for you. definatly allot better results then you would have got with the GF2MX that was in it. you should download a few games demo's, like halo ( it has a timedemo and outputs the text file) i get a average of 20 FPS with everything on low with the res at 1024x768. i would love to see what your average FPS is with your setup.

i would almost think that you could try Doom 3 demo. or another newer game. i know that should run Leopard real nice ( that is once you mod the installer to remove the machine ID check and the virtual speed limit, which you would not need to do since you are above the 867mhz G4 requirement.

Thanks guys. The big improvement that I liked was in the user interface, which saw a 4x increase. It just makes the overall system 'feel' much more responsive.

A dual 1.4 will be very nice!!!

Hi,

How much are you guys spending to upgrade your G4s? Did you compare the cost of upgrading to buying a new (or at least newer) machine? With the new Intel iMacs that have a real graphics card, the price to buy a nice machine has come way down.

David

Between the cost of my G4, the extra RAM, and the processor upgrade, I have about $300 invested all told.

What I want is a Mac Pro. But at the moment I have a wedding in January that I'm saving for, so the Mac Pro will have to wait a few months. I did this to be able to run OS X in the meantime for not a huge investment.