MDD G5 Upgrades?

[MacRumors]

Appleinsider reports (http://www.appleinsider.com/news.php?id=267) that PowerLogix is working on G5 upgrades for MDD (Mirror Drive Door) PowerMac G4's.

[bennetsaysargh]

imagine what a wind tunnel that would be!

you'd get blown away by the performace, and lown away by the fans!:p

[Phillip]

whats the point? isn't it abit early???

[Gymnut]

Nice. My Dual 1Ghz MDD is approaching 1 year and it's nice to see that eventually I'll be able to extend its useability with upgrades. What I don't get is, "PowerLogix would be forced to research the processes of binding the PowerPC G5 to an older 133MHz or 167MHz bus, only to be bottlenecked by its limitation".

[punter]

then you could have a g5 with a case which can fit more drives in it, like two optical!

[iEric]

That would be so good if powerlogix came with a G5 for the MDD...yay...But I still wanna buy a G5 20" iMac...I dont know..mmm...

[Chaszmyr]

right now is a G5 chip really worth it without the new architecture anyway?

[amnesiac1984]

Originally posted by Chaszmyr
right now is a G5 chip really worth it without the new architecture anyway?

I understand from the article that they are developing a motherboard addon as well meaning that we might get the new architecture with the chip!

[ITR 81]

This G5 upgrade probably won't appear until around the fall of next yr because as stated in the article the new G4 dual upgrades are suppose to be coming out by Spring time.


Most folks want to be able to upgrade to a G5 from G4. I know if they made PB version I would buy one right now but I know that won't happen.

Also this now makes me wonder how hard will it be for them to upgrade a G5 to a higher processor? Say a single 1.6 to a single 2.0?? I bet we could be seeing upgrades like this in a yrs or so time frame.

I believe as soon as the first G5 PM's start reaching the 2 yr mark we will see upgrades for them.

[isgoed]

And while they're on it: They should make dual processor upgrades for those with single 1.6 G5 or single 1.8 G5 systems.

[willmg]

While upgrading present G5 systems seems to make good sense, I don't see how they could have a "motherboard addon" that would give G4 macs newer architecture. To get new architecture they'd need a new MB(I just dont see how sticking somehting in a PCI slot or into the cpu socket could give more functionality), and with just a new processor I haven't seen anything that says single G5 chips at 1.6GHz would be much faster than your current dual 1-1.25GHz G4 setup. What makes the G5 screem is its FSB and memory connections. Now once the G5 gets up past 2GHz then replacing/upgrading may be worth it if the price isn't to steep, after all if you spend say 599+ on an upgrade and all you get is say a 300-500MHz boost, is that worth it when you could sell your current comp and spend say 1500+ and get a system that runs circles around both your current one and any upgraded G4s? Sorry to rant I just don't see it being worth the price unless the upgrades are massively cheaper than current G4 top end ones, or somehow add Hypertransport and faster memory support.

[cubist]

Because the 970 is 64-bit and uses a different memory bus, this board is going to be huge. You will have to buy all new RAM and install it on the upgrade board. Video performance is not likely to be very good. And the board will be very expensive - likely over $1,000.

Frankly, I don't believe it.

[blue&whiteman]

powerligix also makes alot of defective products. many of their upgrades arrive DOA. if you're going to upgrade any cpu I reccomend sonnet. they are a very respectible and solid company that has been chosen the number 1 upgrade company by virtually every mac mag or web site. the one I have as no issues with anything.

anyway, a G5 upgrade wouldn't offer much more performance since its needs the new logic board architecture to work the way it was intended. if you want to upgrade from a G3 to a G4 or from a slower G4 to a faster one then I highly reccomend a sonnet upgrade.

FYI: when newertech(formerly the best upgrade company) went under sonnet nabbed all their best employees.

[DrBoar]

G5 in G4 towers, as useful as the "legendary" Power PC upgrade of the IIci;)

If there will be drop in replacement G4 around 1.5 GHz dirt cheap then it will be useful for a while. But soon the low end tower will be a 2 GHz G5 and that will kill the "high end" upgrades faster than the LC475 killed of the the upgrades of the II series and the LC/LCII/LCIII or how the G3 killed the 604E upgrades.

The night is not yet upon the G4 but 4 years old it cast a long shadow :o

[johnnowak]

This makes no sense.

[lewdvig]

I contacted them when I read this yesterday.

PowerLogix says the G4 upgrades are going to scale up nicely. They keep getting faster and faster.

I would guess maybe 1.5-1.6 dual G4 upgrades next summer. With apple possibly dumping the Moto G4 entirely next year (G5 and G3+Altivec) the price of the chips might come down.

They are cautious when talking about the G5 though. I think this is pure R&D at this point. A new mobo is no simple engineering task.

Apple would rather we buy new G5s. They won't make it easy.

As an OC'ed P4 owner, I love the new G5 case, but I also know its overkill. I prefer the look of the G4, so it would be great to stick a G5 inside of it.

[lewdvig]

Originally posted by willmg
While upgrading present G5 systems seems to make good sense, I don't see how they could have a "motherboard addon" that would give G4 macs newer architecture. To get new architecture they'd need a new MB(I just dont see how sticking somehting in a PCI slot or into the cpu socket could give more functionality), and with just a new processor I haven't seen anything that says single G5 chips at 1.6GHz would be much faster than your current dual 1-1.25GHz G4 setup. What makes the G5 screem is its FSB and memory connections. Now once the G5 gets up past 2GHz then replacing/upgrading may be worth it if the price isn't to steep, after all if you spend say 599+ on an upgrade and all you get is say a 300-500MHz boost, is that worth it when you could sell your current comp and spend say 1500+ and get a system that runs circles around both your current one and any upgraded G4s? Sorry to rant I just don't see it being worth the price unless the upgrades are massively cheaper than current G4 top end ones, or somehow add Hypertransport and faster memory support.

The cpu and ram on a card. You get the full benefit of a fater FSB. You lose Hypertransport, or what ever Apple uses, to connect the southbridge/IO to the northbridge (logic, cpu, ram).

This is not a bad compromise at all.

And how will this effect video performance in any way?

This would be pretty sweet.

[lewdvig]

Originally posted by blue&whiteman
powerligix also makes alot of defective products. many of their upgrades arrive DOA. if you're going to upgrade any cpu I reccomend sonnet. they are a very respectible and solid company that has been chosen the number 1 upgrade company by virtually every mac mag or web site. the one I have as no issues with anything.

anyway, a G5 upgrade wouldn't offer much more performance since its needs the new logic board architecture to work the way it was intended. if you want to upgrade from a G3 to a G4 or from a slower G4 to a faster one then I highly reccomend a sonnet upgrade.

FYI: when newertech(formerly the best upgrade company) went under sonnet nabbed all their best employees.

I had a duall 800 from Powerlogix in my sawtooth and it was AWESOME!

Take upgrade feedback with a grain of salt. On PC usergroups you get people complaining about X, Y or Z company for the same reasons. Its usually user error.

[lewdvig]

Originally posted by cubist
Because the 970 is 64-bit and uses a different memory bus, this board is going to be huge. You will have to buy all new RAM and install it on the upgrade board. Video performance is not likely to be very good. And the board will be very expensive - likely over $1,000.

Frankly, I don't believe it.

Video performance will be effected in what way?

[willmg]

I just dont see how ram and cpu on a for lack of a better term "daughtercard" would give much performance boost, they are still limited by the fact that they are connected either through a slow ass PCI slot, or a 167MHz limited FSB cpu socket. If I am totally wrong about this please explain.

thanks

[TomSmithMacEd]

I don't know if this would be good or bad. More product choice would be good, but it all depends on the performence of that chip.

[QCassidy352]

Originally posted by lewdvig
I contacted them when I read this yesterday.

PowerLogix says the G4 upgrades are going to scale up nicely. They keep getting faster and faster.

I would guess maybe 1.5-1.6 dual G4 upgrades next summer. With apple possibly dumping the Moto G4 entirely next year (G5 and G3+Altivec) the price of the chips might come down.


whoa, really? I thought the G4 wasn't capable of geting much higher than 1.3 Ghz or so (even the 1.42 was just overclocked, right?). Or was that just motorola's incompetence, i.e. another company can scale the G4 higher?

[maxvamp]

Has anyone here every tried to shove a 427 into a GEO Metro????

I am not sure I would invest such a creature if PL could make it work. Why not just get the G5??

Just a thought

Max

[strider42]

Originally posted by maxvamp
Why not just get the G5??

Just a thought

Max

My thoughts exactly. Given that this would likely be a rather expensive upgrade, and figure you could take that money, sell your current mac and probably come up with a figure fairly close to buying a new computer which would bring a lot of other benefits with it as well. By the time the g5 is refreshed and older ones are out on the market, it even makes less sense to upgrade. I've never thought upgrades were a particularly good idea from a cost/performance point of view, and are more a matter of techno envy than real world productivity gains. Better, in my mind, to make do for a little while, sell the old, buy new, and never look back.

[Gymnut]

A processor replacement for current G4's to upgrade them with a G5 cannot be compared to as G3->G4. It should be interesting to see what kind of performance gains are to be achieved with a G5 hindered by a much slower front side bus. I liken this to dumping a Ferrari engine into a poor aerodynamically designed car. Not to say that I wouldn't jump up and down for this, since I'm an owner of a Dual 1Ghz MDD. I'm all for processor upgrades.

[Blackstealth]

Originally posted by strider42
My thoughts exactly. Given that this would likely be a rather expensive upgrade, and figure you could take that money, sell your current mac and probably come up with a figure fairly close to buying a new computer which would bring a lot of other benefits with it as well. By the time the g5 is refreshed and older ones are out on the market, it even makes less sense to upgrade. I've never thought upgrades were a particularly good idea from a cost/performance point of view, and are more a matter of techno envy than real world productivity gains. Better, in my mind, to make do for a little while, sell the old, buy new, and never look back.

You make a well reasoned point, however some of us won't be buying a G5 until there's room in there for 4 HDs and two optical drives. My MDD is chock full and I don't have any free wall sockets for setting up two firewire HDs and a firewire burner.

As it is I don't really have a need for a G5 at the moment but 2-3 years down the line I might and if Apple don't offer more expandability by then I'd be highly interested in an upgrade kit.

[lewdvig]

If you put the memory on the same card as the CPU FSB is not an issue. This could work. Also, there is absolutely no reason why you could not make this work with any speed of RAM - just use a dip switch.

I should also point out, I build and OC PCs like crazy and I have yet to find a stick of PC 2700 DDR that did not run at PC 3200 speed.

I/O will be slower than a real G5, but the current serial ATA standard barely taxes a non-hypertransport system. I don't see this being an issue.

You guys are missing the point here. This gives people choice, and choice is always good.

Basically all the 'problems' listed here are solvable.

In a year, if you give me the choice of a 2GHz G5, 1GHz FSB upgrade that lets me keep my drives, ram and case that gives me joy to look at, all for $1000 I will take it.

[saint.duo]

I doubt Apple will go back to dual optical drives. They dropped it from the line because less than a certain percentage of MDD orders had dual drives in them. I don't know what that magic percentage is, though.

Originally posted by Blackstealth
You make a well reasoned point, however some of us won't be buying a G5 until there's room in there for 4 HDs and two optical drives. My MDD is chock full and I don't have any free wall sockets for setting up two firewire HDs and a firewire burner.

As it is I don't really have a need for a G5 at the moment but 2-3 years down the line I might and if Apple don't offer more expandability by then I'd be highly interested in an upgrade kit.

[rog]

First of all, regarding the argument about the slow G4 bus. Despite all the G5 hoopla, it isn't clear that the faster RAM and the drastically faster bus actually results in any great boost. The 1.6 G5 runs about as fast as one would expect a 1.6 G4 to run if there was such a chip. Maybe another 10-20% faster at best. So in a totally redesigned chip, 5X faster bus, bigger L2 cache, and much faster RAM, it's only a bit faster at the same clock speed than a G4?!? Not that impressive. Pretty lame actually. And now we all know that Panther didn't boost G5 speeds more than G4 speeds. Some benchmarks showed 10.2.7 was actually faster than 10.3 for G5s. But that' s a differnet problem.

Personally, what I'd like to see if a DP 1.6 G4 upgrade, using the 7457 and sticking on 4MB L3 cache. But it would have to be about $350 at most and that will never happen. That's what it would take to double the speed of my DP 867. And by the time they come out, one might as well just sell the DP 867 and buy a closeout or refurb DP G5 1.8 for just a few hundred dollars more difference. I just don't see a market for MDD upgrades since so many were DPs anyway. Maybe if one is stuck with an MDD SP 1GHz a DP 1.6 would be a huge boost, but they didn't sell many of those.

[asgardn1]

Apple may have dropped the second 5.25" bay because few people bought a MDD with two drives. The reason for that was not that no one cared. No one needed another DVD-ROM drive that only burned CDs at 32X10 as their second drive.

_________
Dual 1.25 G4 MDD
•Pioneer DVR-A06; Lite-On 52X32X52 CD-RW
•2-Western Digital 10K-36GB SATA on RAID 0 on Sonnet SATA card
•80GB IBM/Hitachi 7200RPM+120GB Western Digital SE drive on RAID 0 on internal ATA/100

[Nermal]

I wonder whether a G5-upgraded MDD would lose its OS 9 bootability? IIRC the G5 is backward-compatible with older code, and the only reason a G5 needs 10.2.7 is because of serial ATA etc.

I own an MDD, and it's good to know that it will be upgradable, even if only to a faster G4 (currently 1.25 GHz).

[Scottgfx]

I bought a dual 1.25 (actually 1.33) Ghz G4 upgrade for my Graphite-Digital Audio G4. The card performed fine from a electrical standpoint. What was a problem was the poorly designed and manufactured heat sink. I've been running the thing with the door all-the-way opened and an extra fan pulling air off of it. You cant make a proper cooling fan with a block of aluminum and a rip saw!!! There is also no way to pull air across the heat sink. The thing had to have been made by hand.

I am told there is a new heat sink and I can get it replaced, but I may just end up selling it on ebay.

Like I said, it works fine and is pretty fast, if you can keep it cool. The bad thing is that the video performance doesn't improve... That's it, the G5 upgrade should have it's own 8x AGP connector. They did things like this for the Amiga 2000, why not a MDD G4 Mac? :)

I bought a $1500 card for a $1000 Amiga that had a 68040, SCSI, Memory, Extra serial and parallel ports and connectors for video adaptors. It was basically an entire computer that sat in a special CPU upgrade slot. Many of us were crazy enough to buy them back then, I'm sure we'll buy them today.

[spencecb]

I didn't think it was possible to put a G5 in any current case design because of the fact that the G5 needs new cooling procedures, hence the new case design with 5 fans, I believe? Please tell me if I am wrong...

[stockscalper]

Here's what is wrong with that picture. On that G4 model the bus is going to be too slow, the ram too slow and the hard drive too slow to see any significant speed increase. Unless you replace the entire motherboard, hard drive and ram there's only going to be a very slight increase in speed. Not to mention those models have outdated graphics cards. So, rather than waste money trying to get a speed bump with an upgrade just buy a new machine. The G5's aren't any faster than the fastest G4's anyway until you get into the dual processor models according to Benchmark speed tests.

[blue&whiteman]

Originally posted by lewdvig
I had a duall 800 from Powerlogix in my sawtooth and it was AWESOME!

Take upgrade feedback with a grain of salt. On PC usergroups you get people complaining about X, Y or Z company for the same reasons. Its usually user error.

user error? I have never owned one to have an error with. I made that comment based on what I have read about powerlogix on accelerateyourmac.com. many people that buy them get them DOA. go there and see for yourself.

[Bear]

Originally posted by Nermal
I wonder whether a G5-upgraded MDD would lose its OS 9 bootability? IIRC the G5 is backward-compatible with older code, and the only reason a G5 needs 10.2.7 is because of serial ATA etc.
It's more than the Serial ATA compatability. Also the second revision of the MDD (Firewire 800) will not boot OS 9 either.

[Bear]

After thinking about it, the major reasons for me to go to a G5 would be the ability to add more than 2 GB of RAM to a system and of course faster processors.

Once all that gets replaced, I may as well get a new system and use my current Powermac for other things or maybe sell it.

A G4 Powermac should make a nice server.

[Nermal]

Originally posted by Bear
It's more than the Serial ATA compatability. Also the second revision of the MDD (Firewire 800) will not boot OS 9 either.

Bingo, FireWire 800 causes that G4 to not boot into OS 9. But if you upgrade a FW400 system (like mine) then there's a chance that it might work.

[bennetsaysargh]

but i don't think the G5 is able to run a classic OS.
it was bulit for mac os x.

[cgc]

Like the old Amiga upgrade cards, if they place the memory on the card itself (along with the CPU) it would see a good speed increase.

[Steradian]

Hmm these upgrades never made much sense to me, most of the time, it is far cheaper to just go out and buy a newer faster mac with applecare. *sigh* however impossible it would be....G5 CUBES ;)

[Sun Baked]

Originally posted by Nermal
Bingo, FireWire 800 causes that G4 to not boot into OS 9. But if you upgrade a FW400 system (like mine) then there's a chance that it might work. The machine would probably boot if you could hack it, but it would be extremely useful to you considering all the USB was moved off the KeyLargo onto a new location on the PCI bus.

aka, Nothing USB would work, since OS 9 is looking for USB responses from the old KeyLargo address space.

The FW800 is probably located at the same address space as the old FW400, so OS 9 would see the FW800 as FW400.

But removing the OS 9 boot process from the bootROM probably killed the OS 9 bootability. (aka, bootROM search/load for the (OS 9) ROM file in the blessed OS 9 partition to bootstrap the boot process -- missing)

[Nermal]

But if all you upgrade is the processor, then surely the USB would stay in the same (OS 9-compatible) place?

BTW, I realise that this is probably fruitless, and it probably won't work, I'm just interested in seeing everyone's reasons :)

[amnesiac1984]

perhaps when we see the g5 small enough to fit in a laptop we'll be able to make fast upgrades and memory chipsets that don't get too hot. like for the amigas.

[Sun Baked]

Originally posted by amnesiac1984
perhaps when we see the g5 small enough to fit in a laptop we'll be able to make fast upgrades and memory chipsets that don't get too hot. like for the amigas. Amiga has production boards awaiting the PPC Amiga OS, but the OS4 is late (Q12003).

The hardware (http://www.soft3.net/pages/pictures_e.php) is already here for G4 (Mai's Artica Northbridge & Via South combo), and Mai Logic and Marvell have shown interest in producing Northbridge chips for the PPC 970.

But it will probably take them awhile for "official" announcements -- if they decide to make them.

Heck we may see some of the current Linux PPC vendors either wait or see vendors use Xilinx FPGAs to synthesize the Elastic-Bus interfaces and graft the PPC970 onto current PPC Northbridges (the 60x and MPXbus FSB). But it won't be very fast compared to a native Elastic-Bus Northbridge interfaces.

Of course IBM should have some PPC970 Northbridges available soon for general consumption.

---

So an uneducated SWAG would be single CPU PPC970 PowerLogix upgrade cards using Xilinx FPGAs.

[McMike]

How about the laptop G5 in the Cube? It could work! I mean they have to reduce power demand and heat for the PBs anyway so maybe somebody would do a Cube upgrade... I think I know what I will be dreaming about tonight :D