Are either of these sawtooths a good deal?

[steamboat26]

I have been looking into buying another mac for a little while, and the upgradeability of the G4 Sawtooth is really appealing to me. I have already checked shipping, which would be about $45.

Are either of these a good deal?

350 Mhz Sawtooth

450 Mhz Sawtooth

Also wondering, while the clockspeed of the processors is slower than my 500 Mhz G3 iMac, would they still outperform it due to the Altivec velocity engine utilized in the G4, or would they be slower?

 

[taylorwilsdon]

Its a good deal, I guess. It doesn't change the fact that without sinking piles of money into it for upgrades, its really not going to be good for anything (at least, anything that your current computers can't already do with ease)

Still, if you've got the time and the money to upgrade the processor, memory and harddrive you could have a relatively current machine built out of that.

 

[thecreativ1]

I'd say the 450mHz would be the best deal. And yes, the G4 would beat the G3 on anything that takes advantage of Altivec.

I just bought a 450mHz Sawtooh last week. I paid $150 as well, and you can't beat that for a VERY customizable Mac.

Good luck!

 

[roland.g]

I've got the same 450, had it new since 2000. Except that it has 768 RAM, DVD-RAM drive, writes, but only RAM type-II rewritable disks, of which I have 4 4.7GBs, 2 unopened and 2 barely used, it also has a zip drive, and I have all the original OS 9, OS 10, OS 10.2, and system restore disks for it. It has an adaptec 2906 SCSI card and I have a nice Microtek Scanmaker 4 scanner for it. I just retired it and am using a Mini. I still pull data off the drive via target disk mode since I haven't completed the transition. I'd consider selling it.

 

[volvoben]

That's not a bad deal, but there is a very small number of uses for which a sawtooth is useful for.

Upgrades aren't worth it, just too expensive. RAM is the only option that might be worthwhile.

Daily use might be fine as long as its very simple browsing, itunes etc, but much more/multitasking will slow it down quite a bit (less than a G3 though).

The only use besides some sort of kiosk/kitchen/shared browsing station or itunes station I can see being worthwhile is adding a SATA card and using the large interior for lots of HDDs, perhaps raid5, as a server. For folks who really don't want to use linux on a cheaper PC box, these old machines will work well.

 

[Totty]

Those deals aren't bad, as has been previously said...but as with anything you can always say that better deals can be found on eBay.
Last August I won a 450mhz G4 AGP with similar specs (40GB hard drive instead) for only 80 dollars (US). Then I pumped some stuff into it as seen below.
If time is not a factor, wait around and watch some eBay auctions for that right moment when you see a nice one that not many people are bidding on.

 

[steamboat26]

A stupid question...
Could add a PCI card with USB 2.0 slots on it right?
I can only find cards with firewire 400...

 

[brad.c]

I'm sure you can--I can't see a PCI USB 2.0 card not working properly, epecially if you run newer OS versions. I'm running Tiger server on a 450 mHz with 4x256Mb RAM installed, and am running two 250 Gb HDs on a Sonnet ATA100 PCI card.

My USB 2.0 PCI card is installed in my Quicksilver back-up desktop.

Those G4s are workhorses for sure. 6 years old and going strong.

 

[BenHoleton]

Does anyone know whether a airport card can be added to one of those?

 

[Totty]

A stupid question...
Could add a PCI card with USB 2.0 slots on it right?
I can only find cards with firewire 400...

Yes, I have added one to mine. I believe it is a Belkin.
Something very similar if not exact to the following:
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=107412

Does anyone know whether a airport card can be added to one of those?

Yes, mine has a slot available (Inside the case) for the airport card with antenna hookup. This is the original airport only of course, no extreme.
Installation instructions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58536

 

[steamboat26]

Does anyone know whether a airport card can be added to one of those?

As far as i know, you would probably be better just purchasing a wireless usb dongle, or a wireless pci card, because original airport cards can get pretty expensive.