G3/G4 Upgrade Card Performance

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hugheba

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Any one have any comments on the various G3/G4 Upgrade cards out there?

I have a 7500 I bought and was looking at upgrading it to with a Sonnet Crescendo PCI G4/400 or G4/800.

With actual day to day use, does it make a big difference.

I know this only speeds up the processor and you're still limited by bus speeds of the different components. Does this make a major draw back to upgrading?

Plus with the processor being on the PCI bus does it slow other PCI devices down?

Your experiences or suggestions with any of these problems would be helpful.
 
Found out the processor doesn't plug into an empty PCI slot so disregard the above question about pci bandwidth.
 
Originally posted by hugheba
Any one have any comments on the various G3/G4 Upgrade cards out there?

I have a 7500 I bought and was looking at upgrading it to with a Sonnet Crescendo PCI G4/400 or G4/800.

With actual day to day use, does it make a big difference.

I know this only speeds up the processor and you're still limited by bus speeds of the different components. Does this make a major draw back to upgrading?

Plus with the processor being on the PCI bus does it slow other PCI devices down?

Your experiences or suggestions with any of these problems would be helpful.
Click to expand...

Upgrading your CPU would be quite noticeable. Not nearly as fast as an actual g4, but definately must faster than the stock 603ppc you have now.

I know when Sonnet first made the g4 upgrades there were a few issues with getting it to work 100%, but I'm sure their drivers are much better now. Make sure you have a good battery installed in your 7500 too. Why you ask? The g4 crescendo driver writes to the pram. If your battery is bad or if you zap pram then you'll need to reinstall the drivers. I'm not sure why they chose that method, their g3 upgrades work flawless.

If you are going to invest in a cpu upgrade check into other things as well. Such as your hd space and total ram. Having a kick arse g4 sucks if you only have 16meg ram, etc. ;)

Tim
 
I personally would only grab a G4/4xxMhz card myself, I think a G4/800 in a 7500 is far too much overkill for the measly 40-50Mhz bus the machine has. Not only that, OWC sells a 450Mhz G4 card from Powerlogix for about 230$ new.

The nearly 600$ saved can then be put towards a savings fund to buy a whole new machine when the G4 card starts showing its age.

If you are really cunning, you can get a 400Mhz card for under 200$ on eBay (I just did :D) and save even more. Beware that the fighting on eBay is fierce, and a card that went for 110$ last weekend actually cost some poor sap over 130$ two days later (G4/350Mhz) from the same seller trying to rid themselves of store stock.

Additional: The G4/400 card should be arriving this weekend, and if you wish, I can detail my experiences with the upgrade and how well my 8600 improved under 9, X, and with DivX playback.
 
Yes please let me know how the upgrade goes.


Yeah, i was leaning in the direction of just settling for the G4/450 and saving my $$$ for the hopefully G5/Power4's that are thought to be coming out.

And I've been searching on ebay for the G4 upgrades, that's where I got the 7500 to begin with. Haven't seen many upgrade cards for G4, mostly G3, but I'll keep my eyes peeled.

How much ram
 
Well, the card should be arriving today, I really don't know if I can give a detailed analysis on the change in performance though, since I will be installing the card at about 10:30pm tonight if it does show up (late shift), and I have to be up by 5am the next morning... joy of joys.

It does look like it will provide a much needed boost in areas though... I am thinking of booting into OS 9 just to see Oni the way it was meant to be played: Voodoo 5 and a G4! :D


Additional:
I got the card, and lo and behold... a very VITAL TIDBIT LEFT OUT OF THE AUCTION IS ON THE BOX. It isn't compatible with all 8600s, just the 180/200Mhz models, not the 250/300Mhz models like mine. The picture of the box never showed the back, and this info was not available anywhere I looked. I got shafted by a seller being too vague when listing compatibility.
 
Well, things are getting sorted out with the seller, looks like I can grab his 8600's mobo and replace my newer (but more annoying at times) mobo with, to get the card running. I currently have it running at 382Mhz (48Mhz bus) in a 7300/200 and it runs nicely...

Starcraft screams on the onboard video... a freakin huge map takes less than 2-3 seconds to scroll!

iTunes 2 under OS 9 was encoding at 5.3X speed to 160Kbps audio FROM A 12X CD DRIVE.

Altivec fractal was getting an average of 1 Gigaflop (which is good for a system I didn't exactly optimize for the card).

This is VERY good for a system that is on 96MB of RAM and couldn't slog through iTunes at more than 2x just a day ago...

I will see how this affects the 8600 when I resolve that... but if you can get one for under 200$ that works with your 7500... I would say go for it. It will feel almost like a whole new machine (except for disk and PCI access, that will still suck).
 
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