G4 upgrade

brentasaurus

brentasaurus

Registered
I was wondering if I could get some feedback on :

OWC MercuryZA G4/550MHz Altivec Enhanced ZIF with 1MB@250MHz 2.5:1 Backside Cache

if anyone has one. I wanna upgrade but I just wanna make sure that its worth it. So any reviews would be great.


BTW - www.xlr8yourmac.com readers gave it great reviews already, but I just thought some more wouldnt hurt..

Thanks
 
Originally posted by brentasaurus
I was wondering if I could get some feedback on :

OWC MercuryZA G4/550MHz Altivec Enhanced ZIF with 1MB@250MHz 2.5:1 Backside Cache

if anyone has one. I wanna upgrade but I just wanna make sure that its worth it. So any reviews would be great.


BTW - www.xlr8yourmac.com readers gave it great reviews already, but I just thought some more wouldnt hurt..

Thanks
Click to expand...

I put one in a Beige G3. The upfront speed won't be affected a whole lot but many things that run in the background will. It helps out alot with Multitasking and IO mostly which means it doesn't get bogged down as much. I got double the speed simply because I had a 266 MHz CPU anyways so I saw a huge increase. But the kicker was it helped with things like iTunes with encoding MP3s, QuickTime with encoding MP4 of my movies from my digital home movies, and SETI@Home (command line version not the GUI one). It also helped with syncing my Sony Clie and other USB anomalies I had. I can watch a large QuickTime movie trailer which I couldn't do before. But before you upgrade your CPU, max out your RAM first with 100MHz chips. That'll boost your speed almost as much at a lower cost. As for OS 9 speed, I never tried it so I couldn't tell you, but it does boot Classic a lot faster.

The cons are it isn't as "user friendly" as the PowerLogix G4/550. You have to rearrange motherboard jumpers for Beige G3s. And I installed the PowerLogix CacheController after I upgraded. Been running in OS X without a hitch since. Makes me want to try overclocking. ;)
HTH and good luck!
 
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