Hey all. I'm not sure which section this should have gone in, but since it is about a Mac I decided to post in the other nix forum.

A few posts back, I posted about buying an older G4 Desktop. I went ahead and did that, and it works great with Tiger.

I was curious though about processor upgrade cards, and I have a few questions about them.

What company is the best to buy from? I heard Sonnet is good.

Is there any compatability issues with Tiger? The card would be installed in a G4 Sawtooth.

Which is better, PCI or just a normal processor card? How do the installations differ?

Google isn't being much help here, maybe I'll try another search engine while I am waiting for a response. Thanks.

http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?model=164&type=Processor&TI=%23TimeFormat%28Now%28%29%2C+&shoupgrds=Show+Upgrades"]http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?model=164&type=Processor&TI=%23TimeFormat%28Now%28%29%2C+&shoupgrds=Show+Upgrades"]http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?model=164&type=Processor&TI=%23TimeFormat%28Now%28%29%2C+&shoupgrds=Show+Upgrades

That is a list of processor upgrades for your Sawtooth. I would stick to either Sonnet or OWC. You may have to update your firmware by booting into OS 9, but I have heard that some people don't have to do that. As for installation, just pop out the old processor and drop in the new one.

Thanks for the info. I've heard practically nothing but good things about Sonnet and their support, so that is probably the direction I am leaning right now.

I have also heard many great things about Sonnet. The only issue that I have heard of (but not witnessed myself) is that some of their more powerful g4 replacements tend to become very hot. I don't know the circumstances of it though.

I, too have a Sawtooth (400 mhz), and am leaning toward either the OWC or Sonnet 1.2 ghz replacement. I just added another 512mb RAM stick from OWC (up from 630) and WOW, it boots up in half the time. OS X just loooves all the RAM it can get. But before I do my processor upgrade, I am buying an SATA controller card and using OS X's RAID utility to set them up on a RAID 0 in an attempt to squeeze every ounce of performance out of my Sawtooth.

Yeah...I might look at OWC too.

Now, one other thing I was wondering is this. My Boot-ROM is listed in System Profiler as 3.3.4f1. I have heard that you need firmware 4.2.8 to use a processor upgrade. Does this mean that my firmware is 3.3.4f1, or are these two dfferent things. I don't want to have to install OS 9 to upgrade the firmware if I don't have to.

Thanks for your responses.

Firmware update 4.2.8

Hardware Requirements
PowerMac G4 and PowerMac G4 Server

Software Requirements
Mac OS 9.1 or later (but not X) required

This is from Sonnet's Encore/ST g4 page:

**Except for SG4-1000-2M, these Encore/ST G4 upgrades require the installation of a supplied firmware patch; you must boot your computer in Mac OS 9.2 (installed on a local hard drive) in order to run the firmware updater application. For 1.8 GHz models, Mac OS X compatibility requires Mac OS X Version 10.3.5 or greater.

The good news is that OS 9 can be found for cheap on eBay (I got it for 13 dollars shipped).

Thanks for the information. I was looking at OWC's cards...and they don't require a special firmware patch, just that you have the latest offical firmware.

I'll probably wait for a while before I go ahead and do it though. My 400 MHz G4 still works quite well, and I'm already getting a new video card this paycheque.

Talk to you later.

Hey all.

OK, I have one more question. I have a copy of OS 9 coming in the mail (for free! A guy I buy stuff from online is selling me an external burner, and I asked if he happened to have a copy of OS 9 laying around, and he threw it in the box for free!) but I was doing some reading online and apparently the required firmware update (4.2.8) sometimes disables third party ram. This computer has 4 ram sticks installed, and at least 3 are third party, possibly all 4 (not quite sure). Is there any way I can check this right now, from OS X, whether the RAM sticks are compatable or not? I know there is a utility that checks, but only for OS 9.....the reason I'm wondering is that I might go ahead and buy a processor upgrade card now, but I also need to know if I need to buy replacement RAM. The burner+OS 9 should be shipping tomorrow, so obviously I can't use OS 9 and that utility who's name escapes me right now to check just yet.

Anyways, just asking for some advice as to how to go about this. Anyone with any experiences on a Sawtooth and Apple's firmware update?

As long as the RAM is low density (32x8 or 64x64 I believe) it should be fine. Where did you hear that the firmware upgrade disables 3rd party RAM, I'm interested in reading about that. As for a RAM checker... I could'nt find anything in my searches, only for OS 9 as you said.

You can read all about it on these many sites.

http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

A support person for Sonnet helped me out though. He said any recent RAM shouldn't have any problems, but since I bought this computer used, I'm not sure how old the RAM is. He said that unfortunately, there are no RAM checkers for OS X that can check if your current RAM will still work after the update, that I would have to wait until I receive my copy of OS 9 and run DIMM First Aid from there to check the RAM. *sigh*....oh well, I can tell you that Sonnet emails you back very quickly and the people working there are very friendly. I think I just decided on Sonnet (and ruled out OWC) after this exchange.

This is kinda weird- I just dropped the 1.2ghz mercury extreme into my sawtooth
(after updating firmware) but when I try to load OSX 10.4, I can't seem to boot from the cd
drive... when I boot from my ubuntu live cd it works great, but no go on osx install disc.
can't hold down 'c' at boot, when I hold the 'alt' to choose the boot options, It never
recognizes the cd.

where did I go wrong?

btw
the deskstar HD the mac shipped with had failed for the last time, so I got myself a
Samsung 80g along with the cpu, which I intended to partition into a dual boot Ubuntu/OSX, and I have an old
5 gig maxtor that holds my os 9.

sunji