Upgrade Snow iMac G3 500 to G4 Possible?

pixmaniowa

pixmaniowa

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I have a Snow, slot loading, Cd-R, G3, 500 Mhz, iMac that I want to upgrade to G4 using any means necessary. Sonnet, PowerLogix, or just a G4 processor. Does anyone have advice or suggestions as to what I need or can do to do the upgrade? I have upgraded my G4 450 to 1.4 Ghz so I know I can physically do the job. I just don't know what product to look for to do the upgrade, if any. Thanks for your help, Robert
 
I heard but don't hold this to me. But I heard that all the chips from G3 to G5 are all the same socket type. It should work but I can't promise anything. A Mac Technician I know at a CompUSA explained to me that the Servers that IBM sells use powerpc cpus. Somewhere in the www.ibm.com website is information that says that the g3 computers can be upgraded to g6 cpus. But I can't find the link for that now. But do some more research on the topic. From what I know, this is a subject not a lot of ppl like to discuss.
 
Check Low End Mac for the particular Mac that you have and see if they have any upgrades listed for your iMac or at least links to sites that can help you on upgrading.

Justl like on the x86 side, not all PowerPC CPUs are made to work with all logic board designs, and not all are even pin-compatible. And about the IBM PowerPC CPUs, remember that the PowerPC is a derivative of the POWER processors made by IBM when Apple, IBM and Motorola had their alliance during the 90s. These chips that Apple uses are made especially for them to run Mac OS/Mac OS X. What you're saying is that something like a POWER5 CPU would be able to run Mac OS X, which is not necessarily the case. And this is assuming that the CPU would even WORK with the logic board design, which usually isn't the case. That Mac technician at CompUSA needs to read up some more on the PowerPC architecture, IMO.
 
If any of you would pay that much to upgrade an outdated processor, i would slap you. You could get a whole new computer for the price of a high-clocked G4!
 
SuperTyphoon said:
If any of you would pay that much to upgrade an outdated processor, i would slap you. You could get a whole new computer for the price of a high-clocked G4!
Click to expand...

Read my response to your post on the other thread and you'll understand why this is the case. The same goes in the PC world, but since it's basically commodity hardware it's not as expensive, although lately a CPU upgrade basically means having to replace the motherboard and various other components. At least with the older Mac all you have to upgrade is the CPU. Everything else works just fine.

And a CPU upgrade on the Mac can be of a significant range, sometimes even using a next-gen G-series CPU if you're going from a G3 CPU to a G4 CPU...sometimes even pre-G-series machines can upgrade to either G3s or G4s. This is like being able to upgrade your Athlon XP CPU on the same motherboard to something like an Athlon 64. You don't see that on the PC side. This is what justifies the high cost.
 
An important thing to note:

IMAC G3's ARE A NIGHTMARE TO DISASSEMBLE. Especially if you're going all the way down to the CPU ::shudders::
 
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