[X4U] [OT] Processor Upgrades

[Jim Soriano]

On Sep 1, 2005, at 10:21 PM, Adrian Stubbs <stubbsz at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> Thinking about upgrading my Sawtooth 450 G4.  It really seems worth
> getting an upgrade but I wondered what your opinions would be.
> Apparently mine is compatible with Mutli-processors but the price and
> the lower clock speed of these Dual Processor cards makes me wonder if
> a) it will be slower and b) it will be more expensive.

<snip>

Hi Adrian:

Over the past 5 years I've gradually upgraded my wife's single  
processor 500Mhz Sawtooth (a rare beast) and she has been thrilled  
with the results.  It's a very robust platform that responds well to  
incremental improvements.  She's a graphic designer doing a lot of  
with with the complete Adobe suite.  The operating system has  
generally kept pace with Apple's upgrades from OS 8.6 through 9.x up  
through 10.3.9.  We haven't yet converted this machine to Tiger as  
she's been on production deadlines for the last 6 months...

First improvement:  More RAM.  The system has had 1.5GB since late  
2000 and it is the single most valuable upgrade you can make.

Second improvement:  Upgraded graphics adapter to ATI Radeon 8500  
AGP.  We did this while she was still running OS 9 and it made a huge  
difference in Photoshop performance.

Third improvement:  Upgraded the hard disk to 120GB IBM (Hitachi)  
7200RPM Deskstar.  The extra space was absolutely required, the extra  
speed was not really noticeable.

Fourth improvement:  Upgraded to an original Apple dual 500Mhz  
processor.  We did this around the same time as installing OS 10.2  
(we never ran Puma on this machine), and without a doubt dual  
processors make OS 10 run SO much better than a uniprocessor.  It was  
certainly faster than the 800Mhz uniprocessor TiPBG4 that I was using  
as my daily machine at this time running Jaguar.

Fifth improvement:  Upgraded to PowerLogix dual 1GHz processor in  
late 2004.  I found this for a good price as a discontinued model at  
OtherWorldComputing (OWC).  We're still using this configuration  
today, and its performance is so good that we have no interest in  
upgrading to a G5 anytime soon.  The performance running OS 10.3 is  
noticeably better than my current machine, a 1.2GHz uniprocessor  
iBook G4.

Planned sixth improvement:  If all goes well, over the weekend I'm  
going to install SoftRaid and put a second 120GB Deskstar in the  
system as a mirrored drive.  We've actually had it installed for a  
while as a clone drive for backups, but that's suboptimal for our  
application.

I expect that this will be the last upgrade for this workhorse of a  
system, unless I can find a screaming deal on a >1.7GHz dual G4  
processor module.  In most cases I've successfully eBayed the  
replaced component to defray the costs of the upgrade, so my total  
upgrade investment over the past 5 years has been < $1000.  Hope this  
insight helps you with your decision.

Regards,

Jim