[bstone]

I got a Sawtooth G4/400 with everything stock except 640mb of RAM. What do you all recommend I do in order to zoop it up?

I have been considering:

- Flashed Radeon 8500 128mb
- PowerLogix Dual G4 1.2ghz
- 7200rpm HD (Seagate or IBM) w/8mb buffer
- Some sort of Combo drive (I haven't a need for DVD burning)

I am running 10.2.6 quite nicely so far. Any ideas on what I plan?

[DrBoar]

I got a G4/400 myself with ATI Radeon 8500, an extra internal IDE drive and external CDRW. I just might get a G4 upgrade if they get cheaper still.

I assume that we soon have a 970 computer out were even the lowend will beat the current high end. At a cost of about 1500 dollars or so. If you add the cost of a dual G4 upgrade (1000 dollar), faster HD (120 dollar), Combodrive (250 dollar) and the graphical card (100dollar or so), you will spend as much as the cost of a new computer and still have a slower one with less features.

A gigadesign 1 GHz G4 (420 dollars) and the nVIDIA 4MX (80 ditto) will only cost you 1/3 of the price of a new computer and still give you a substantial performance boost

Where the cost cutoff is between upgrading and buying a new one is for you to decide but my suggestion is to avoid upgrades that is more than say 50% of the price of a new computer.

[thefamousmred]

Be aware that flashing a PC graphics card to work on the Mac is piracy, just like downloading a copy of Word of Photoshop. I don't want to debate whether or not it's true - it is, read the license agreement for the software. The EULA doesn't leave a whole lot of room for argument.

If you're cool with that, fine. I ain't gonna stop you. But please be aware of what you're doing.

On to more interesting things....consider the WD Special Edition drives too. They're fast + have the 8MB buffer. Also, consider maxing the RAM. Depending on what you're doing, there's a big difference between 500-600MB and 1GB+. We all know how OS X loves memory...

Finally, +1 on not spending more than 50% the cost of a new machine. A new machine will get you a faster bus, better graphics, bigger drive, support for large (>137gb) drives, etc to start with. You could sell the Sawtooth on eBay for a fair chunk of cash. Put that money together with the money you were going to spend on upgrades and you might be able to snag an dual 1.25ghz....