upgrading Sawtooth

[csean at poc.it]

on 04/15/2003 04:13, Power Macintosh G4 List at G4 at lists.themacintoshguy.com
wrote:

>> 3.  Is the mobo upgradable to a more current board?
> It is the rare Macintosh that you are able to upgrade the motherboard.
> The Sawtooth is not one. It is a very upgradeable machine, however,
> that should be very serviceable. The processor card is upgradeable; you
> can replace it with a faster one. You can also add an ATA-133 card with
> a faster drive to give better performance from you disk subsystem as
> well.


Do check out www.xlr8yourmac.com, it's a great resource. Most CDRW and
DVD/CDRW combo drives are easy to install (the site has pics) and
compatible. People have also installed DVD-R drives like the Pioneer A05.

Processor is easy to upgrade too. Check out xlr8yourmac for feedback and
resellers (e.g. Other World Computing) for processors. A good
price/performance upgrade seems to be the Gigadesigns G4/800 with 2MB of L3
cache at around $295 from OWC.

Motherboards can be upgraded and xlr8 has reports on people using Gigabit
Ethernet boards with success. BUT... you also need the power supply unit, as
the two models are different. Macresq often sells the motherboard for under
$200, but the power supply unit often sells for $100(!) though you might
find one for less on ebay.

Personally, I've upgraded my Sawtooth G4/350 with:
- XLR8 G4/550 processor (from OWC for $125)
- LG CDRW/DVD combo drive (32x10x40x-16x) which works great in 9 and X (cost
$99, though they're a lot cheaper now)
- video card: first, I swapped the Rage Pro with an nVidia Geforce4 MX,
which worked okay but isn't fully supported on the 2x AGP bus (the ADC port
doesn't work and Quartz Extreme works less well than on a 4x AGP); then I
put back the Rage Pro AGP and added a Rage Pro PCI (both 16MB), which gives
me dual monitor support. Much cheaper solution (albeit less powerful) than,
say, an ATI Radeon 8500

Good luck.

Chris