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rvirmani · 11:39 PM

I currently use a Sawtooth G4- 450 Mhz machine.

80Gb Harddrive, and 1 Gb of Ram. Radeon 8500 Mac Edition

I use the iapps, MS Office vX, surf the web and use VPC 6.0 (unfortunately)for some Circuit Design and Java programming. (I am a student in Engineering, and Windoze is what the University has standardized on).

Which upgrade would be better for me? going to 800Mhz or 1Ghz?

Also any thoughts on Powerlogix vs. Sonnet?

Has Powerlogix solved the Wake from Sleep issues with their single CPU upgrades?

AS I have a Uni-north 3 chipset, a dual is out of the question.

I don't do much graphics, and am looking to get a speed boost for web surfing, and generall use (especially iphoto and VPC6.0).

Thanks in advance.

PS

This is my first post!

ShinySteelRobot · Feb 14, 2003, 06:01 AM

Hard to say which upgrade is better for you since you don't specify how price-concious you are. I recently purchased the Powerlogix 1GHz upgrade for my (formerly 450MHz) Cube. Unless you are super price-concious, I'd go with the 1GHz upgrade. The speed increase is dramatic with a CPU that's well over 2X as fast as the old CPU.

If I had been absolutely broke at the time, I might have gone with the 800MHz. I'm sure it's a very noticable improvement too. However, VPC does better with more MHz, so you may want to stretch the budget for the 1GHz.

Haven't tried Sonnet, so I don't know how good/bad they are compared to Powerlogix.

My upgraded machine does not wake from sleep, but that doesn't matter to me since I never use sleep anyway. I don't think the power supply for a Cube draws much power as compared to a tower. YMMV.

You may be able to get a nice $15 discount on your upgrade card if you you use coupon code "cubeowner" at OWC/macsales.com (courtesy of CubeOwner.com...although it may only apply to Cube upgrades...but you could always try it with a non-Cube upgrade to see if it works

)

gizzard · Feb 14, 2003, 06:33 AM

I reviewed and compared the Sonnet and Giga Designs upgrades here .

rvirmani · Feb 14, 2003, 07:51 PM

I will be going with the 1Ghz speed and making sure I have L3 cache!

I am leaning towards the Sonnet card (due to their reputation).

::maroma:: · Feb 19, 2003, 07:22 PM

I am also trying to decide between Sonnet and Powerlogix. From what I've read so far, the Sonnet seems to be the winner (just barely).

Keep us informed of your progress.

D'Espice · Feb 20, 2003, 05:44 PM

Don't forget the Gigadesigns G4 CPUs, they're cheaper than the Sonnet or PowerLogix CPUs. I've been doing some thinking on that 800 MHz or 1 GHz issue too, and it pretty much comes down to this:

If it comes to the "is it worth the extra money" question, there's no definite Yes or No answer. It depends on what you are doing and how much you expect from your Mac. It also depends on your finances and whether you're on a tight budget or not.

The Gigadesigns G4/800 CPU is the first thing to consider, it's $229 (OWC) yet it comes without L3 cache. The L3 cache is very important when it comes to 3D applications like games. It is almost completely unimportant when it comes to stuff like browsing the web or home office applications like word processing. The Gigadesigns G4/800 CPU w/o L3 cache will make the Mac about as fast as an iMac, the specs will be almost identical: 800 MHz CPU, no L3 cache, 100 MHz bus, SDR-SDRAM.
The Sonnet or PowerLogix G4 CPUs with L3 cache are more expensive yet they offer a certain performance advantage over the CPU without L3 cache especially when it comes to games and 3D applications.
The 1 GHz CPUs offer an overall performance increase of about 5-10% over the 800 MHz CPUs with L3 cache, again depending on what applications we're talking about. If you do need every bit of performance, these are the CPUs to buy. The 1.2 GHz are not an option yet because they're too expensive and not worth it yet.

A nice review comparing the performance of several G4 CPUs can be found on InsideMacGames. Unfortunately they haven't done a lot of benching but it's a good start.

dlefebvre · Feb 21, 2003, 10:00 AM

I'm very happy with my Sonnet 1Ghz upgrade. I went from a 400 and my After Effects renders are just a little bite more than twice as fast. I tested an old project I did, it went from 8 hours of rendering to 3 hours 53. It makes a difference.
I installed the upgrade last fall and I have not noticed any stability or wake from sleep issues. I chose Sonnet because there was nothing else to install, like a cache enabling software or something like that. Also the fact that my old Power Computing is still runing with a Sonnet G3 card after almost 5 years (Mind you, I find it kind of slow).

D'Espice · Feb 21, 2003, 11:22 AM

Huh? I thought there was like a software to enable the L3 cache under OS X, isn't that necessary anymore? I remember that there was a software to enable the L2 cache on my Sonnet G3/450 for my PowerMac 7300

::maroma:: · Feb 21, 2003, 01:56 PM

Originally posted by D'Espice:
Huh? I thought there was like a software to enable the L3 cache under OS X, isn't that necessary anymore? I remember that there was a software to enable the L2 cache on my Sonnet G3/450 for my PowerMac 7300

I read somewhere that there was no software setup necessary for the Sonnet cards. It's one of the advantages listed in Macworld review I believe.