From: John Tamine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 03:44:38 -0500
ok. i'm done being po'd (at myself). what is the list of G4 upgrades that are compatible with OSX (at least up to 10.2)? what about the Sonnet 1GHz ZIF processor in an XLR8 ZIF carrier card? no? then what is the fastest G4 upgrade that we know for sure will run jaguar?
john
You get screwed by Sonnet and the first thing you want to do is give them some more money???? Go ahead you won't be disappointed . You''ll be screwed again if you buy the 1GB Zif and expect it to work in a carrier card ;-) I couldn't help but have a little fun at your expense :-) The 1 GB Zif uses a newer G4 chip then other Zif's and Sonnet has as usual used some odd tricks to get it to work. These as usual end up hobbling the upgrade in a number of ways. The biggest one is it only runs at 66MHz bus even on the B&W and PCi G4 machine which run natively @ 100 MHz this issue alone makes the upgrade a poor choice for these machines. At least one person has tried it in a carrier card in an older machine and it is no go.
IMHO the currently fastest upgrades for our older machines are: The G4 7410LE Zif sold as the 550-600 MHz Zif by XLR8/Daystar and OWC also has a version. The older 7410 chip is also out there and is usually sold as 450-466 MHz range Zif. It runs a bit hotter so likely won't run quit as fast as the 7410LE Zif. Both Zif's include a 1MB L2 cache. Which means they do much better in real world use and in bench mark tests then one would think. In fact they are the equal in many but not all tests and real world use with the Sonnet G4 700/800 cards. Reason being the Sonnet cards only have 256k L2 cache. The 1MB of cache makes a much bigger difference then most people realize.
The other speed choice is the new Powerlogix G3 1000 MHz card. It is now backed with a 2 year warranty from OWC and sells for the amazing price of $235.00 no Carrier card needed. It is much like the combo George is using but is an all in one solution. It is also an official upgrade which the Zif and Carrier card combo is not.
I've been running the XLR8/Daystar 550-600 Zif in a Carrier card in my Umax machine since last June 04 and I'm really happy with it. The speed is limited by the Bus of our machines and the fact that you are limited to 9x the Bus speed. So you never get the full speed of the Zif but then you also don't have to worry about it over heating. Also the L2 cache on our motherboards becomes an issue with higher speeds especially with G4 upgrades. I turned the motherboard cache off by using a conductive pen to bridge the gap on the two small soldier points at J38 on the motherboard. It is also possible to put a small drop of solder here if you know what your doing. A very small number of motherboards have jumper pins on the board which makes things easier. This trick has let me run my machine at a bus speed of 59MHz where as before it would only run at 55 or so without errors. So I'm running at 533 MHz CPU bus of 59 . Every machine will have a different limit. Mine will boot and run as fast as 61 or 62 MHz bus but not without errors and best not to push to the total edge.
Ryan of XPFacto is hard at work to see if he can find a way to make the Sonnet G4 700/800 cards work with the Umax machines. OWC is also looking into the matter and the fire has been put to Sonnet to do something on the issue. later Will S
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