g4 400 Sawtooth ... needs upgrade

[Grndzer]

What can I do with my AGP Sawtooth? Can it get it to run a 133 bus? can I get a 733 or a 800 g4 in that mobo? What about board swaps? take the board and cpu from a quick silver and put it in my AGP Sawtooth case?

Any info would help,

thanks
Roger

 

[thehuncamunca]

i'd just upgrade the RAM make sure you have at least 512MB

 

[jptrott]

try looking at over at other world computing
(http://eshop.macsales.com/)
They have some quick links that are useful to see what your upgrade options are.

 

[Grndzer]

Thanks For the info.

 

[adamjay]

theres ALOT you can do to the Sawtooth in terms of Processor acceleration

http://www.sonnettech.com sells G4 upgrades in 800mhz, 1000mhz, 1200mhz, and 1400mhz running you anywhere between $240US and $500US so you can really do something that fits your budget, lots of options

also the PC100 memory is cheap.
as little as $160 for a 1GB chip (pricewatch.com)
and $60 for a 512mb. The ram ceiling on the Sawtooth is 2GB, with 4 slots to work with, so very inexpensive options.

if you get the processor upgrades, you really arent going to be able to tell any difference unless you have at least 1GB of ram

macaddict just did a feature on upgrading G4's such as the sawtooth and mentioned that an upgraded 1.4ghz /1gb ram Sawtooth ran twice as fast as the stock 400mhz / 256mb

you certainly have alot of options mate.

 

[ephramz]

You can do a lot to boost that Sawtooth's performance. There are plenty of accelerator boards you can stick in (faster CPU daughter boards). Check out http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/cpucards.html for tons of reports on each card in each Mac model. Just be careful about dual processor cards, which most Sawtooths can't handle. Boosting the memory always helps too.

I had a 350 MHz G4 Sawtooth with 128 MB RAM that was excrutiatingly slow on Jaguar even, always giving me the beach ball. I put in a Sonnet 1 GHz upgrade card and 512 MB extra RAM and both helped tons. The card helped with general speed, and the RAM when I was running lots of applications.

I still have the system running off of a 5400 rpm disk that I should probably swap for a 7200 rpm drive to speed it up some more, but everything is reasonable now.

I basically got a new computer for $600 for the card and $75 for the RAM.

I don't think you can upgrade the bus speed, so that's a limiting factor.