[The Placid Casual]

Just realised that instead of buying a new system, I could take advantage of the current exchange rate and buy a processor upgrade from the US for cheap, cheap, cheap...

Currently I have a dual 450 box, but am thinking of adding a the above upgrade Dual upgrade, a GF4 quartz extreme graphics card, and a SATA card with 3 SATA drives. I already have a Gig of RAM...

How would this stack up performance wise against say a dual 1.25 direct from Apple considering that the upgrade will cost less than 1/2 the price of a new machine?

Cheers,

Marc

[chris v]

You'd just have to do the math, cost-wise. My single-450 Sawtooth with the Giga Designs 1.2 GHz upgrade in it runs both SETI and RC5 -72 faster than my 1 GHz Quciksilver, so I don't think at that speed, the processor is too constrained by RAM or the system bus.

I will say that my new Powerbook with the DDR 2700 RAM does feel a tad "snappier" than the Sawtooth, but it's nothing major. (recently used apps, still held in memory might re-launch a bit faster)

Where your old box is going to lag behind is the ATA 66 drive bus, which will limit you on drive expansion.

If you do upgrade your Sawtooth, I wouldn't get the GeForce 4 MX, if that's what you're thinking. If you're looking for a card in the $150.00 price range, the Radeo 9000 will be faster, and the GeForce 4 TIs are quite a bit more expensive.

Powerlogix can go ahead and announce those dual card for Cubes any day, now.

CV

[The Placid Casual]

Thanks for the reply... much appreciated.

I just checked out the Radeon 9000, and they are more than reasonable, so looks like it will be one of those to start with.

The upgrade I'm sure will be fine for my needs if it even gets close to even dual 867 performance. And at the USA/UK Pound conversion price, would be a possible bargain.

As for the HD, my plan was to install a SATA card in the machine, and dispense totally with the onboard ATA66... Is this possible? Or I may even just put an Ultra ATA 133 card in the and run the drives off that? Again, is this an option?

Assuming the drive issues can be sorted, I would guess that I may be able to upgrade the box for little over 1/2 the price of a new one...

New Dual 1.25 machine: £1065

I would still have to add a 2nd hard drive @ £70 and RAM @ £140

So a total of: £1275


To Upgrade:

New Graphics card would cost: £100.

Processor upgrade would cost £550.

Hard Drive: £70

So a total for the upgrade would be £720.

Hmmm, a touch choice, as with the first option I do end up with 2 machines... one with a 3 year warranty.

Man, why do these choices have to be so tough?

[traktimino]

definately go for the upgrade. I just got a dual 1.2 ghz upgrade from gigadesigns, and it rox! Everything is a lot faster and smoother and the noise and heat are fine. It took me five mins to install and it booted on the first try. So far the only thing to have crashed was microsoft word... My xbench scores are up from 44 at 400 mhz to 133 and that's with stock hd's and graphics. Wow i sound like an advertiser from gigadesigns lol. Trust me upgradeing is worth it.

[power142]

I hate to throw a spanner in the works, but if you can get the dual 1.25 G4 for 1065ukp then I'd go for that. You get a decent graphics card, dual 1.25 G4 and a base hard drive all covered by the 1 year warranty. Memory for these babies is cheap, add a couple of 512MB DIMMS if you have the cash, as memory is your friend.

IMO, the G4 with 2MB cache rocks - don't get me wrong, it ain't no G5, but I have the dual 1.42 G4 with 2MB cache and it's a very fast and responsive machine, and if you're moving up from a 450, then wow!

If you choose to upgrade, then I wouldn't waste the cache on the ATA controller - unless there are any issues with the controller on your particular G4 model. Just get yourself a nice 7200rpm disk with 8MB and that will make a big difference. If you want to populate the machine with 4 drives, it might be worth the upgrade card so that you don't take a performance hit from having multiple drives of different speeds on the same IDE channel.

[The Placid Casual]

Thanks for the response...

I have just got a Radeon 9000, and have decided to go for the Upgrade, to be bought from OWC.

However, I have just seen that they have a 1.42-1.5 ghz single upgrade for $500. Any idea how this would compare to the dual upgrade?

It would mean that I would be spending under £250 which is a major bargain as the same upgrade would cost £800 in the UK!

[GoGoReggieXPowars]

Don't bother with the SATA drives and controller, you won't see enough of a difference for the price.

I ordered an OWC single 867-933 upgrade, to replace the 800 one I bought over a year ago. That one didn't have any L3 cache, so its effective speed is about 600MHz when compared across models.

As for choosing single over dual, it mainly depends on what you use the machine for. The single 1.42 would still run rings around what you've got now.

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
Don't bother with the SATA drives and controller, you won't see enough of a difference for the price.

Serial ATA is cheaper.

The cards are $10-15 cheaper than the ATA-133 cards and the drives are a few dollars more expensive.

In the end, it ends up being cheaper.

[a2daj]

After having used a dual proc machine for over a year now I could never go back to a single proc machine, even if it were twice the speed of my current CPU, unless the OS I was using was excellent at sharing CPU time (something XP is not good at and OS X still has some problems at times). I love being able to multitask with no slowdown. So, I personally would recommend a dual CPU upgrade since your machine is already a dual proc. And since your system can handle a dual CPU might as well take advantage of it

Keep in mind that there have been lots of issues with PowerLogix upgrades in the past. Check out the CPU DB at Accelerate Your Mac for customer feed back.

I have a dual 1.2 PL upgrade in my Quicksilver G4 and I had the CPU replaced once because the original CPU I had blew out. It came overclocked at 1.333 GHz from PL but I don't think that's the reason it died. I think it's because the original heatsinks had the fins facing the wrong direction so there wasn't any new cooler air blowing across the heatsink. My replacement CPU survived a rather warm Seattle summer in a room with no AC. The current PL dual upgrades should have the PPC 7457 chips which run a lot cooler than the chips used in my upgrade.

[sledsbehave]

just adding another "go fer it" to the crowd. i bought a 1.4ghz sonnet upgrade on ebay and it's an excellent upgrade for the money. i am at the top of the G4 speed, so i don't see me upgrading for a while, or at least until i see a need for a 64bit G5.

i didn't bother upgrading my video, since i still use a vga monitor. something to think about if you are using a vga monitor.