Power Mac G4 upgrades

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

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My dad has picked up a Power Mac G4 in exchange for a £25 donation to charity... Not bad. It's a 450MHz G4 with 1GB RAM, Rage 128 Pro AGP graphics and a couple of 20GB hard drives. It's got Tiger installed at the moment.

My dad has expressed curiosity about getting a Mac, say a modern iMac, at some point, so this would be a good way for him to dip his toe in OS X without incurring massive expense before he knows whether he likes it.

Is it possible to meaningfully upgrade this machine? 1GB RAM seems pretty good, but I'd like to upgrade the processor and pick up an Airport card. It looks like an Airport card is easy enough to get hold of and fit, but can anyone advise me on what I would need to do to upgrade the CPU? From what I can tell it's a "Sawtooth" system - does anyone know what speed CPUs this would support and how tricky it is to install a new CPU?

We're not looking to spend much money on this, but it looks like I could pick up an Airport card for £15-20 and a processor for about £20, or anything up to £100+ if I go for one of those upgrade CPU things like the kind you used to get to install a Pentium processor in a 486 system.

Any thoughts? We're not expecting miracles here, and there's an element of experimentation here, and just idle curiosity, but if we could get it into some sort of fit state for use as a second computer that would be great.
 
Bump... Ended up picking up a 1.8GHz Sonnet Encore upgrade chip on ebay, so going to install that. I've also bought an Airport card and I'm eyeing a Radeon 9500 Pro (remember them?) on ebay so that we can at least get Leopard to look half decent. All in all, it'll have cost the thick end of £100, which seems a bit daft for an old machine, but my dad is prepared to spend that where he wouldn't spend £100 on a G5 or whatever. It'll work well enough for what he wants, and it'll be a fun experiment for me to see if I can make it work!
 
Pretty sure you should try for a GeForce 6200 (IIRC you can flash the PC version which makes it far simpler to find), as this will allow the use of Quartz Extreme/Core Image, which will make Leopard feel far snappier than a non 3D accelerated desktop.

EDIT: 7800GS seems to be the most up to date card that can be put in, although this would have to be a PC card flashed.
 
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paradigm said:
Pretty sure you should try for a GeForce 6200 (IIRC you can flash the PC version which makes it far simpler to find), as this will allow the use of Quartz Extreme/Core Image, which will make Leopard feel far snappier than a non 3D accelerated desktop.

EDIT: 7800GS seems to be the most up to date card that can be put in, although this would have to be a PC card flashed.
Click to expand...

Yep, the 6200 is a good bet but the Mac ROMs I've found are only for an XFX card which I can't currently see on eBay for a sensible price. The 7300 is that bit more expensive again. The radeon 9x00 (where x=5, 6, 7, 8) are good, especially the 9500 or 9700 as they have decent core image support, will work in a 2x AGP machine without faffing about taping pins and there is a single Mac ROM which will do any of the variants of those two cards.

I'm hoping so anyway! It's not the easiest stuff to research!
 
You can say that again. The last time I did any G4 upgrading was when I owned my Cube, I managed to get a none-xfx 6200 into mine (using the infamous XFX ROM), worked fine, didn't appear to be problematic.
 
paradigm said:
You can say that again. The last time I did any G4 upgrading was when I owned my Cube, I managed to get a none-xfx 6200 into mine (using the infamous XFX ROM), worked fine, didn't appear to be problematic.
Click to expand...

The site I've been reading - themacelite - says that the XFX ROM may work with non-XFX cards, or it may require ROM editing. I looked at their ROM editing guide and saw about a billion lines of hexadecimal and thought nah... It seems some nVidia cards are a lot more fiddly than ATi cards, so if I can get the 9500 series I will do.
 
Fair enough, I think I still have the 9500 from my G4 Cube at home, I'll check tonight and if I do it's yours if you want it.
 
I've found two cards, although in typical ATi style there are no model numbers (nor part numbers printed on the board oddly). I've brought them both to work to find out what they are in our QuickSilver.

I've got a feeling one is a 9000, and one is a 9600, but I'll report back later.
 
I was right, a 9000 and a 9600XT.

The 9600XT is a PC card flashed, but it worked fine in my Cube, and seems OK in work's quicksilver.
 
paradigm said:
I was right, a 9000 and a 9600XT.

The 9600XT is a PC card flashed, but it worked fine in my Cube, and seems OK in work's quicksilver.
Click to expand...

I've a nasty feeling the 9600XT is 4x/8x only and this ancient Power Mac I'm dealing with is only 2x... That right?

Sorry if I've wasted your time :/
 
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