[Zemrec]

I'm still looking for a dual 800-1000 MHz CPU card, but can't find any on Ebay. OWC (Macsales.com) only has 1.2 and 1.4 GHz, and they're $780 and $1000! Way way too expensive.

So I was thinking I may just go with a single CPU, but again, can't find anything with decent speed on Ebay (I want something thats faster than my 700 MHz ibook.) So it looks like I'll have to buy new.

OWC has their Mercury 800 for $250, 1 GHz for $350, and a Gigadesigns 800 for $250 and 1 GHz for $390.

My question is which would you get? And can the cheaper boards be overclocked to 1 ghz?
I saw that xlr8yourmac.com had reviews of them, and mentioned dip switch settings for the Gigadesigns boards, but I didn't see any mention of if and how successful overclocking is.

Or, even better, if anyone has an old Dual board they'd like to sell, please tell me!

[RealMac]

Good luck. Moving to duals definitely makes a big difference under osx.

I went from a g4/400 sawtooth machine to a MDD 867 G4. It was like night and day. Of course the system bus was faster and it used DDR memory, but still. Great way to maximize your investment.

[Shaktai]

If you decide to go with the single CPU, get the fastest you can afford and forget about trying to overclock it. What overclocking is available will not get you near 1000 and the heat and stability problems can be a nightmare, even with the little bit of a boost you might get.

The dip switches on the gigadesigns, primarly allow you to optimize for the chip "if" it will allow it, which is extremely variable. That means on an 800 you might get to 867, then again you might not. On a one gig, you might get a chip that will go up to 1.11, but then you might not.

An 800, 867 or 1000 G4 with 1-2 gigs of L3 cache will all greatly outperform your 700 mhz ibook. The difference between my 800 G4 (no L3 cache) and my 600 iBook is like night and day. Just make sure your G4 upgrade has at least 1 meg of L3 cache. Don't get one without the L3 cache.

Me? Well if I can't afford to get a G5, then I'll probably upgrade my 800 single with no L3 to at least 1.25 or 1.4 single with L3 cache and a faster graphics card or a Powerlogix dual 1 gig.

[RealMac]

This is kinda off-topic, but here goes anyway... As you know, I ordered a G5 dual machine. It seems to me that unless card upgrade companies find a way to upgrade current models to G5s or motorola comes out with significantly faster G4 chips, the mac desktop upgrade market is going to dry up.

I haven't seen any upgrades yet for the MDD G4 machines (am I just looking in the wrong place?). The G5 looks like it will be a complex design for a cpu upgrade, between the complexities of using a 64-bit processor on a motherboard designed for a 32-bit chip (can we say incompatible?) along with the new apple-designed system controller that may require some reverse engineering for existing Power Mac G5 systems.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong though. A bit premature though I guess.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by RealMac:
I haven't seen any upgrades yet for the MDD G4 machines (am I just looking in the wrong place?)...

Hopefully I will be proven wrong though. A bit premature though I guess.

Well you are correct that there are no upgades currently available for the MDD models. It took a while for them to become available for the Quicksilver 2002 models.

A lot depends on Motorola and/or IBM. The new powerbooks show that the 7457 is finally available. Now if they can just get the speed up, then maybe an extended upgrade path will be availlable for current G4 users. It is concievable that the upgrade market may develop paths for the G5 just like they did for the G4. It will take time.

As they say, "Necessity, is the mother of all invention." Where there is a demand, there will be innovative people and companies who will attempt to meet that demand. I don't think the upgrade market will die, but is will probably face some big challenges.

[DrBoar]

There can be plenty of life leat in the G4 upgrades, I never thought I would say that . The first key issue is price! 10 years ago when the LC475 came out and offered Quadra performance at a much lower price point it killed the high price 50 MHz 030 and the 040 upgrades.

If we assume that the G4 will level of around 1.5 GHz or so and the performance celing will be a dual 1.5. After the arrival of 10.3 it might be that even the G5 1.6 is faster than a dual 1.5 upgrade and that during 2004 the G5 will get much further ahead. But even then a dual 1.5 at 500-700 dollars would be a good deal but at 1000 or so the low end G5 will kill it.

The second key issue is performance and features/OS compability. Upgrading 68k and nubus ppc is totaly pointless and now the PCI generation is sliding into history with no AGP card and hacked OS X compability. This will hit the G4 in a couple of years.

The GigaDesign 1 (@1.2) gives you close to the maximum singel CPU speed for less than 400 dollars, if you need much more than that you need a dual G5

[giantmike]

I'm not so sure about the upgrade market drying up. These upgrade companies are pretty smart. They were able to find a way to put G3 upgrades in machines using the extra Level 2 cache slot, that is ingenious!

[Zemrec]

(Sensing a major tangent occurring, tries to recover)

Ok then! Well, anyone know where to get a Dual 1 Gig then? I can't find them anywhere. I'd really rather have a dually, but the 1.2's on OWC are too much.

I'm trying to spend less than $1000 total to build this beast, and I've already spent $400 on just the mobo, Core case and power supply.

Looking back, I should've just bought someone's dead G4 box and replaced the mobo, but of course hindsight is 20/20. I must be very myopic in foresight.

So now hopefully I can get RAM, HD, video and CPU for < $600. Newegg is my favorite place for generic PC parts, so I'm going to get a good 512 MB module and an 80 GB Seagate (I have 2 of those in my PCs, they're quiet and pretty fast), and reuse an old CDRW drive (if it turns out to not be Mac compatible I can steal one of my combo drives from the PCs.)

For video I'm going to get an old Rage card from someone at work who's also building a G4. And I'm going to try to get my Geforce 2 card to work. It'd be nice if I could get the Radeon 9500 I just picked up for my Win2K box to work, but I guess thats hopeless.

Well, any more suggestions or leads for CPUs?

[Kahpoosta Kid]

My question is which would you get? And can the cheaper boards be overclocked to 1 ghz?
I saw that xlr8yourmac.com had reviews of them, and mentioned dip switch settings for the Gigadesigns boards, but I didn't see any mention of if and how successful overclocking is.

Or, even better, if anyone has an old Dual board they'd like to sell, please tell me! [/B][/QUOTE]

Macworld (Oct.) has reviews of OWC, Giga, Sonnet and Plx. The performances are close across the spectrum. OWC has dip switches-which you can tweek the speed of the CPU and is easy to install and move if you must to another box. Ummmm, check the article; there is another you can tweek. I've, years ago always got boards you can dial up or down with slight improvements in speed.