G3 Upgrade or G4 Upgrade?

T

tk4two1

Professional Crastinator
I am looking into getting a processor upgrade for a B&W G3. I am stuck between a PowerLogix G3 900Mhz and a Sonnet G4 500Mhz. One of my biggest concerns is the lack of AltiVec in the G3. I will be using Panther and various apps like Illustrator, PhotoShop, Quark, ect... Which processor will give me the best performance? I already have a gig or RAM and am wondering if I need to update my video card also. What do you think?
 
Get the G4. No question about that.
As for doing graphic rendering, I would also recommend upgrading your card, but you have to look at what you can actually use with that B&W G3. At any rate, I definitely recommend G4. Vast improvements there.
 
Thanks, I think I will go with the G4. I will also look into a new video card, any suggestions of a midrange card that will give me good performance in Panther?
 
Well, pretty much the ONLY card you can upgrade to is an ATi Radeon 7000 PCI Mac Edition. They sell for about $110 - $150.

I've got one in a similar machine (see sig) and it runs great. Much improved over the Rage 128 that came with the machine.
 
No, it's not compatible with his machine at this time. The 700MHz and 1000MHz G4 ZIF upgrades are only for the beige G3s at this time.
 
Get the G3, it's just as quick as the 500mhz G4 even though it lacks AltiVec.

I have another old Beige (233 originally) at the office I upgraded with a G4 500, sent it back a week later and got the G3 900...much more noticable difference! Thought about getting a 1ghz G4 for my beige at home, but I decided against it. The little bit of extra performance (at twice the price) isn't worth it at all.
 
I saw this at Macminute.com. The site is Other World Computing. Also, a good resource on upgrading a Macintosh is Xlr8YourMac.com. Their hardware lasso will give you the comments an articles by people all over the world about their experience upgrading all kinds of Macs. Lastly, I would most definitely suggest upgrading the video card to see if you can get one that supports OpenGL.
 
If you can find a used 'original' mac radeon pci card (in good shape), I'd jump on it vs the radeon 7000.

The 7000 can beat the original radeon card at lower screen resolutions, but the 7000 was beat by the original at higher screen resolutions..

http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=232

Or if you have some time to wait, you could wait a bit and see if the rumored new pci card from ATI makes it to market. It is supposed to be based of the radeon 9000 series....
 
Of course now that I ordered the Sonnet G4 500Mhz, the 700Mhz G4 and the 1Ghz G4 is now available for the B&W G3. I guess I will be sending it back and getting the 1Ghz. I also ordered the Radeon 7000. Thanks for your help everyone.
 
I am all over this. I have a B&W with a G3 500 upgrade in it. It is not doing well for the reason I bought it...running a Protools music studio. I think that 800 G4 might just be the proc for me. I can justify another $350 to get this thing running nice. Then I'll Ebay the G3 500 and really not be out that much money with a kick-ass machine on top of it.

I have been waiting for this for months now. I am super excited.

Later,
Eddie
 
tk4two1 said:
Of course now that I ordered the Sonnet G4 500Mhz, the 700Mhz G4 and the 1Ghz G4 is now available for the B&W G3. I guess I will be sending it back and getting the 1Ghz. I also ordered the Radeon 7000. Thanks for your help everyone.
Click to expand...

I recently did exactly the same thing. I haven't even installed the new one yet. Now a 1Ghz G4 is available? Phooey, bad timing again! :eek:
 
Well...now I am bummed out again...I just went t DigiDesigns site and they have updated their compatability list again...now they say the OS X version of ProTools isn't supported for PCI graphics based machines. Now getting a new proc wont help anyway. This sucks...maybe I can live with it running in OS 9 and the new proc will still help. Anyone want to trade an AGP for a B&W?

Didn't think so... :(

Eddie
 
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