[Agent69]

I know someone who is selling a 1.25ghz PowerMac G4 for a really good price, so I am considering upgrading from my 700mhz eMac. I have two questions about the 1.25ghz Powermac G4:

1. Is there any benefit to filling up all four RAM slots? For example, would four 128MB memory modules perform as well as two 256MB modules?

2. The PowerMac is question has a Radeon 9000 Pro video card (w 64MB of RAM) in the 4x AGP slot. Is there any benefit to upgrading the video card or is there no point in doing so with a 4x AGP slot?


Thanks in advance!

[Agent69]

It would also be useful if someone could tell me the biggest EIDE drive that the PowerMac G4 can support.

[Taipan]

Hi!

1. Not sure, never heard of 128MB being slower. ithink as long as it's DDR333 it won't make any differnce.
2. I'm using the Radeon9000 myself and haven't used a faster card, but I don't think that it gets to the AGP bus' limits (AGP4x ist still standard on PC mainboaards, isn't it?). There should be enough bandwidth for a faster card, but the only ones available at the moment are the Radeon 9800 and GeForce 4 Titanium (4600), and both are probably around 300$ or more in the US (400� here in Germany). In my opinion that's simply too much, and the machine's cpu speed will probably limit them a bit, though it will definitely ba faster than the 9000.
3. At least the machine's ATA/100 controller supports all sizes available today, I have read that the ATA/66 one doesn't have a 128GB limit, either, but I won't promise that.

[Kenneth]

I have the dual 1.25Ghz FW800 here.

1) I won't put four tiny 128MB into the machine...IMHO..I have 2x512MB and a stock 256MB here.

2)There should... depends on your money.

3) The mobo inside the MDD IDE thing is 48bit addressing support.. so dropping a 250GB is not a problem.

[Agent69]

Thanks for the replies.

In regards to my RAM question, the amounts I used in my example was fictional, as I would install much more memory. The reason I asked about this is because some computers are able to obtain a performance boost when memory is installed in every available socket.

Thanks again.

[DrBoar]

Regarding the RAM there was interleaving in the RAMs of the old PCI powermacs like the 8500 and so but the DIMMs and onwards does not interleave for the G3 and G4 CPUs. So no point in filling all the slots

The 9000 is not a bad card and will fare quite well with modern games and the 1.25 GHz G4 is not much of a CPU to feed it. However, if you insist on running your games at 1600x1200 with all candy on then the 9000 will fail. But if you run at 1024x768 or so then it is OK. An other snag is that in retail the 9000 is high lowend to low midrange and the next step up is the very high end and pricy 9800. Something like the 9500/9600 as midrange would be a nice more sensible upgrade but that is only PC in retail. With the ATI 7000 card costing about 3 times that of the PC version I do not expect any such nice surprices from ATI as a nice midrange card, but hope springs eternal

[Agent69]

Thanks DrBoar; it was interleaving that I was thinking of. In regards to the Radeon, I don't play games on my Mac, with the exception of MacMame.

What I want to do is push a 22" monitor at 1600x1200 @ 85hz but I was a little concerned that the Radeon 9000 Pro will have problems coping with such a high resolution, considering the processing demands of Aqua and Quartz Extreme. After your response though, it seems like it should work fine. The applications I mainly use are: Safari, Mail, TextEdit, Preview, Terminal, GraphicConverter, iTunes, DVD Player, Fugu, OmniOutliner, Watson, and MacMame.

[ginoledesma]

1. While there may still be inherent latencies in larger capacity memory modules, they are negligible at best. Best to get the largest DIMMs you can afford and max out RAM. Having more memory will hopefully mean increased productivity, which is what we're all after.

2. The Radeon 9000 card should be able to easily handle the 1600x1200@85Hz requirement. Spec-wise it should handle it at 120Hz tops. At least the commercial Radeon 9000 Pro card does.