CPU Upgrades

[vouder17]

Please can someone help me, i have an iMac 233 Rev. B and i want to upgrade the CPU, please can anyone tell me which would be better:

Sonnet G3 600mhz, 256 L2 cache/600mhz, with firewire (i feel i trust this company more)
Powerlogix G4 500mhz, 1MB backside Cache (heard a few bad reviews)

Does anyone have any experience with these upgrades?
And do you know where i could possibly get new iMac Motherboards, if this is even a good idea??????

Thanx
Vouder17

 

[applemacdude]

I trust Sonnet too. But it all depends of what you would rather have. Would you rather have Firewire or would you rather have a minor speed bump. It all depends on you. Apple doesn't make "new" motherboards but if you want a mnor speed bump a rare mezzino slot video card. Is it worth it? I say no, but if you have the $ by all means buy it. I would save the money you would pay for the updrade and put it towards a new mac

 

[CMillerERAU]

Well let me tell you about my upgrade experiance. I had a Rev. C 266MHz iMac and wanted to run OS X and have firewire. I purchased the Sonnet card and installed it myself. After that the monitor wansn't quite right. It would shimmy near the corners (I had an eMac do something similar so I had Apple replace video system). However my iMac didn't fair so well. I sent the upgrade back and paid for a 33% restocking fee and after a few months the monitor got worse and worse until one day *pow!* the whole thing died. And when I said *pow!* I wasn't kidding, I thought it was going to catch fire next. However it just made a big pop and wouldn't boot after that. Anyways, I don't think the upgrade was specificaly at fault, it could have been on the verge and opening the case finaly tweaked it too far.

The moral of the story: I would stick with the iMac's 233Mhz G3 until you can scrape up enough for a whole new machine, no sense sticking with all the old hardware that will hold back the upgrade's performance anyway.

 

[Mblazened]

Originally posted by CMillerERAU
And when I said *pow!* I wasn't kidding, I thought it was going to catch fire next. However it just made a big pop and wouldn't boot after that. Anyways, I don't think the upgrade was specificaly at fault, it could have been on the verge and opening the case finaly tweaked it too far.

It was probably just its time to go. But i would be wary of any processor upgrade for an old imac, they just can't be worth it.

 

[vouder17]

Thanks alot for the replies.

I have now decided to not upgrade the processor and just buy a new HD and pass an IDE cable outside my iMac and attach it to a CD-RW and an increase in RAM(512MB)

But with this upgrade will the CD-RW work and will Mac-OSX work at an effecient rate.

Thanks again

 

[CMillerERAU]

For one thing, I wouldn't mess with the drive cabling, Apple threw some nasty curveballs in the design to keep people from modifying iMacs. What I did for extra storage was buy a USB/Firewire hard drive with the idea that one day I'll upgrade to a computer with FireWire. Though slow for its capacity, USB held up nicely for MP3's and worked wonders as a backup to the main drive. I even think you can get a USB 2.0 CD-RW to work with your imac (you'll be limited to 4x speed though). Since Apple is implementing USB 2.0 on the G5's its safe to assume that by the time you're looking to buy a new mac your drive will work at full speed on just about any mac in production.