The Sonnet 1 GHz G4 CPU cards come with 2 meg of L3 which is supposed to be able to run at 250 MHz. Since turning off the cache seems to fix your problem, you could also try to run the L3 cache at 200 MHz and see if 250 is just a wee bit too fast.
Slower L3 is better than no L3.
Slower L3 is better than no L3.