Skip to main content
Home Forums 68kMLA Just conquered a 1ghz G4 upgrade — #9
Post #9 by johnklos
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryPowerPC
Post DateFri, 5 Mar 2010 - 18:14
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/just-conquered-a-1ghz-g4-upgrade.20060/
Post
Sonnet Crescendo 1ghz G4 for beige PCI Powermacs. I've been seeing a few of these being sold by Mac dealers on ebay for $225-$250 so grabbed this one because it was only $100. You can't get them from the Sonnet store anymore, either. Also got $8 back from Bing + $2 ebay bucks so cost me $90. I'm gonna have a beige running Tiger by Easter. ;D
These are nice accelerators. I have one in my colocated PowerMac 9600. It replaced a 700 MHz G4 (which got moved to another machine, of course) because I got it for $100 and the extra speed and cache (it has 2 megs of 250 MHz L3 cache and 256 megs of L2; the 700 MHz one only has 1 meg of L3) certainly comes in handy on a heavily used system.

This is the one for the earlier Macs, not the G3 ZIF socket. There was a 1ghz upgrade for $125 on ebay recently but I'm not sure if it's still there. Considering OWC charges $119 for the 1ghz G3, $125 for a 1ghz G4 is cheap.
The G3s are good accelerators - they have a full 1 meg of CPU speed L2 cache which makes them quite fast. However, the software which actually sets the speed doesn't work past 10.4.something so you can't run the latest 10.4 or any 10.5 unless you're fine with letting the whole CPU run at 500 MHz. Bad PowerLogix!

If you really want to get fancy with your 1 GHz G4, get 10.5 on that system. It's been done by others, but it's not trivial.

mp.ls