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Beige G3 with Sonnet ZIF 800Mhz purple G4 upgrade - need help

M

mperu99

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 1, 2020
7
5
hello,
wonder if there are some helpful people out there.. First my name is Mike, I am very new to vintage macs, i have always been around PCs
and decide to do something different so started with a mac plus, then 1 then 2 pluses.. lol
I have 3 G3 towers all work, however this last one i purchased has a unique processor in it. it has a purple sonnet G4 800Mhz processor.

i boot up off cd, 9.2.2 and system profiler shows 67mhz.. also seems sluggish like it really is 67mhz even though its my understanding the
processor is capable of knowing what the jumpers are set at and auto adjust itself to 800mhz , its not the void sticker was still in place
so this was something done by a professional company? at any rate i removed the sticker and the default jumper block is the 300Mhz block
i tried varies jumper settings using my micro jumpers. , no still only 67mhz no matter what i do.

any ideas? It would be really COOL to see this in action.

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velocityg4 said:
Did you install the drivers from the CD? I also wonder if the firmware upgrade mentioned on the Sonnet sure was every performed.
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I dont have a CD, I bought it like this, has a Hard Drive but they ***** erased it so am i needing some type of driver?

btw the firmware is for os x i am running 9.2.2 and i see no drivers for 9.2.x
 
mperu99 said:
I dont have a CD, I bought it like this, has a Hard Drive but they ***** erased it so am i needing some type of driver?

btw the firmware is for os x i am running 9.2.2 and i see no drivers for 9.2.x
Click to expand...

That may be a problem. It's been about 15-20 years since I had any Sonnet accelerator card. As I recall it had a Control Panel and Extensions to use it in Mac OS 7.x through 9.x. Although I can't recall if that was only needed in Macs which used PDS or L2 Cache CPU cards. Not those in models where you replaced the actual CPU.
 
YES SIR! it was the Sonnet_Crescendo-Encore_Driver_2.3.1.hqx that had the Processor Enabler and the Metronome and now runs at 800Mhz !!!

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!

BTW - installed 9.2.2 from an EMAC recovery CD works great! includes many drivers for ATI / APPLE and NVIDIA 3D cards.

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Does the driver do anything but cosmetically report the true CPU speed? I notice that the bus speed is 67MHz. I wonder if SysProf was reporting that for the unrecognised CPU before installing the driver or is the system snappier now?
 
@mperu99 You think about trying Tiger on that system? Because it should be a pretty good experience at that speed with that much ram.

weckart said:
Does the driver do anything but cosmetically report the true CPU speed? I notice that the bus speed is 67MHz. I wonder if SysProf was reporting that for the unrecognised CPU before installing the driver or is the system snappier now?
Click to expand...
Well, a quick check says that the Beige G3 has a 67 Mhz bus, so I'm guessing it's accurate.
 
The Bus Speed of the G3 is 66,66 MHz. Nomally you see 66,7 or sometimes 66,8.

At Weckart
You need the driver to activate the the Altivec engine, caches, power conversion and for pre-G3 machines Write-through
 
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Blue&White G3 and later G4 PowerMacs have bus speed 100 MHz but CPU replacements like this have to run at 66 MHz (or 66.66 or 66.7 or whatever MHz)
 
joevt said:
Blue&White G3 and later G4 PowerMacs have bus speed 100 MHz but CPU replacements like this have to run at 66 MHz (or 66.66 or 66.7 or whatever MHz)
Click to expand...

The G4 Quicksilver has a Busspeed of 133 MHz and the G4 MDD non base version has a 166,6 MHz Bus (the base MDD has a 133 MHz bus, except the 2003 line with 166,6 MHz only)
 
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TzunamiOSX said:
The G4 Quicksilver has a Busspeed of 133 MHz and the G4 MDD non base version has a 166,6 MHz Bus (the base MDD has a 133 MHz bus, except the 2003 line with 166,6 MHz only)
Click to expand...
And I can speak to that last bit, as my 2003 G4 MDD reports a bus speed of 167Mz in System Profiler.
 
TzunamiOSX said:
The G4 Quicksilver has a Busspeed of 133 MHz and the G4 MDD non base version has a 166,6 MHz Bus (the base MDD has a 133 MHz bus, except the 2003 line with 166,6 MHz only)
Click to expand...
repairedCheese said:
And I can speak to that last bit, as my 2003 G4 MDD reports a bus speed of 167Mz in System Profiler.
Click to expand...
Yup, I forgot. Point was that these accelerators usually have to reduce the bus speed in order to work which is a shame, but the improvement in CPU speed is usually worth the loss in bus speed. I have a B&W G3 and PowerMac 8600 (50 MHz bus) with 1GHz accelerators (also had 500 MHz accelerators from XLR8). The PowerMac 8600 already has a low bus speed so it doesn't get lower than that (I think). I might have an 8500 and 9500 under my bed but don't remember if I upgraded their CPUs.
 
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