[G4] What processor upgrade do members support?

[Philip J Robar]

On Sep 4, 2006, at 12:21 AM, ethan gideon wrote:

> Greetings All,
>
> I'm at that inevitable stage where I need to upgrade badly. I have  
> a G4 733 Digital Audio will be upgraded to a dual 1.6 -1.8 GHz.  
> Now, there are a great deal of options out there and I've used the  
> links on "LEM" home page to research. Still too much information!!
>
> What do fellow G4 users recommend? My budget for dual processors is  
> about $500 -$600. I quite like the Giga options for price and  
> general feedback but there are so many others- PowerLogix, Sonnet etc.

My first thought is that you should sell the G4 and use the results  
in combination with the $600 and get a new Mac mini (waiting first  
for the 9/12 announcement of course); however, in answer to your  
question www.xlr8yourmac.com has lots of user feed back on CPU  
upgrades and a decent filtering mechanism for narrowing down the  
reviews you see.

You need to aware of the differences between the CPU versions and the  
amounts and types and speeds of the cache(s) offered by the various  
upgrades. The only way you'll be able to reasonably choose between  
them is have a good idea of what you use your Mac for and find a  
knowledgeable vendor from whom to make your purchase. (Or find some  
benchmarks - see below.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_G4 for probably more than  
you want to know about the various flavors of the G4. It's worth  
skimming through the paragraph on the generation you're looking at.  
(7447a/b most likely.)

Note also that a dual CPU may or may not be big win depending on what  
you use your machine for. If the applications you use are not multi- 
threaded (iTunes for instance) or you don't tend to do more than one  
CPU intensive thing at a time then the second CPU isn't going to do  
you much good.

macsales.com has benchmark results for the upgrades they sell. Start  
here: http://eshop.macsales.com/benchmark/ and work your way to  
results you're interested in. You might also check places like  
xlr8yourmac and barefeats.com for CPU upgrade reviews.

As to brand, you can always find a few people who have had a bad  
experience with any given vendor or brand, but I think that you  
really can't go wrong with any of the major brands.

If you don't have a good local Mac shop (few and far between these  
days), then I would suggest macsales.com (aka OWC, aka  
OtherWordComputing) or smalldog.com.


Phil