Sonnet Updrade Review and Comments--Long Detailed Message
This one's for you TyleRomeo.
Here is the link to my review of the upgrade: Enter Apple G4 Mirror Drive Doors in Step 1 and select Sonnet as the Card Manufacturer. There you will find 3 hands on reviews of people who purchased this card for their MDD Mac G4 and what their experiences were. Mine is in there too, listed as Glenn D.
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/cpureview.lasso
Basically, it was worth it. Hell yes it is faster and smoother in MacOS X. Is it expensive? Hell yes. Do I regret doing it? Hell no. Even if I buy a new Mac in a year or 2, an Intel Mac, this UBER fast G4 will be a back up media server or something else....like just plain cool. Since mine boots in 9 I get ALL MAC old school and PPC MacOS school. HUGE backwards compatibility.
Will there be a faster card for the MDD ever? NO. NO. and NO! This is it people. Read my conversation with a Sonnet person (tech support) and find out why. And NO there will not be an upgrade from OWC or Powerlogix for the MDD so you may as well buy the 1.6 or 1.8 dualie from Sonnet now if you want one while they are still available. Personally I went with the 1.8 Ghz, cause if you are gonna do it at this point, you may as well get the best. Perfection. I dropped in a genuine Mac 9800 128 MB 4X AGP (not some crap flashed PC card) and 2 GB ram and MAN this G4 is F*$#king fast ! And as the G4 MDD is my main Mac that I use 3-5 hours a day 7 days a week, I know the upgrade is getting very good use for the $$$.
Here ya go.
Customer
I purchased the Encore/MDX G4 Duet upgrade and it is working fine and I am very happy with my purchase. However, I had a problem where I wanted to boot from a clean install of MacOS X Panther 10.3 and the Sonnet upgrade could not load to 10.3.0 which was the version of retail disk I bought early on. In fact the computer fan spun up super fast, crashed hard, and I shut down and had to remove the hard drive with 10.3 on it so the computer would default back to the older 10.3.9 partition I had the upgrade working under. Then I read in the requirements online at the website that 103.5+ is required. It will run in 10.4.x and 10.5.x, which is all fine, but not 10.3.0 or anything less than 10.3.5. I dont understand that. How can I have 10.3.5 installed as a minimum without first installing 10.3.0 and updating? I dont have a Panther install disk that installs 10.3.5 first natively. Apple retail only sold 10.3.0 installs and updates were free that I recall. For me to install 10.3.5, I first have to boot from a real Apple Panther disk and install 10.3.0, then update to 10.3.9. However the upgrade will not accept any partition or install disk with 10.3.0 on it. It is a little like a chicken and egg comparison.
Why advertise that 10.3.5+ is ok when you can never install that without going to 10.3.0 first which is not compatible with the upgrade? Please tell me how I can do this? I may go to 10.4 or 10.5 eventually, but for now I need 10.3 and I want to do a fresh install of Panther. Please help me figure this out.
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
It's really simple. Take the MDX out, update to 10.3.5 or higher and reinstall the MDX. Versions of OS X lower than 10.3.5 simply don't understand how to talk to the new CPU type we are using in this upgrade. Hence they can't boot from 10.3.4 or lower. Hence our warning. Of course, once I moved to 10.4, I had zero interest in booting into 10.3.x ever again. After I updated to 10.5, I had zero interest in booting to 10.4 ever again. But that's just me I guess. Everyone uses their computer differently.
Customer
Thank you for answers to my questions.
I wont remove the MDX card since doing so requires installing the old CPU and that whole process makes me VERY nervous because I cant see what I am doing since the CPU socket is under the processor cards. I worry about bending pins and such. I am not as experienced with this as others, so I did it once successfully and I wont do it again unless I am selling the computer.
My only other option is actually one you mentioned which makes very good senseupdate to Tiger or 10.4, which I already own the retail disks for as it turns out. Then I got to thinking
.what about Leopard 10.5 which I dont own and can buy new. Will this upgrade work in 10.5 as well as 10.4? I wonder if going to a higher MacOS will only just end up slowing down the system as the processors have to handle a more advanced operating system. Right now the upgrade is rocket fast in Panther. If I go to 10.4 or 10.5 wont I see a slight decrease in performance because the operating system is putting a heavier load on the CPUs? This was part of the reason I wanted to stay in Panther
cause it works, and its fast.
Then again, maybe 10.4 or 10.5 will be faster since they might be better written for a dual CPU system? I hope 10.5 is still PowerPC enabled and not just Intel. Any light on this subject will help me close the books on this.
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
Believe it or not, 10.4 was faster than 10.3 and 10.5 is faster than 10.4. And you have a pretty fast machine. I'm typing this email on a Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) machine running our single 1.8GHz processor and 10.5.2 and it's pretty spiffy fast.
Your machine with the dual processors is an even better choice since 10.5 is fully multiprocessing aware and so is the Finder. In regards to the latter, it means the Finder is much faster than it used to be. No more SPODs (spinning pinwheel of death) as you manipulate files. And Spotlight (the search feature introduced in 10.4) is actually usable in 10.5. It was pokey and slow in 10.4.
10.5 is still PowerPC enabled. Apple can't really drop support just yet. I'm sure they want to but there are still too many PowerPC machines out there. I wouldn't be surprised if 10.6 is Intel only as the Apple landscape might have changed.
Customer
I think I will consider jumping to 10.5 especially since the upgrade I bought is the dual 1.8Ghz MDX and you indicate that 10.5 is more processor aware than 10.4 is and I do use spotlight a lot.
That said, if I may ask another question
remember I am not complaining
.only curious. Why was this upgrade made with 7447 CPUs with 512K L2 per processor and not the 7448 CPUs with 1MB L2 per processor? Was there a large cost difference but a less than large difference in performance? I understand that my front side bus is running at 167Mhz which by todays standards is very slow I guess, so maybe using 7448s with the bus speed as a bottleneck would not have mattered considering the cost of the 7448 chips. My guess is the upgrade would have been too expensive and the performance about the same. However, I also understand that the more cache you have the faster the system especially when you have limiting issues like a slower bus speed or slower memory. Can I assume that there are no efforts at Sonnet to refresh this product for the MDD to use 7448s and that the upgrade I have (which is fantastic by the way) is the last and final issue for the MDD G4 coming from Sonnet?
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
Back when this upgrade was designed the 7448 was just a twinkle in an engineer's eye or a schematic on his drawing board.
And you nailed it exactly. Huge cost increase, marginal performance increase. And the 7448A runs a lot hotter than the 7447A. So a dual upgrade would have been impossible. We wouldn't have been able to keep it cool. Also we could have clocked it up to 2GHz but we found it to be very unstable.
Freescale did give us some samples and we made some prototypes and I managed to kill two of them just by abusing the chip with some gaming. Games like Unreal Tournament and World of Warcraft utterly killed the chip within 3 months. Then Intel Macs came out and we decided to just shelve any future processor upgrade projects and move into other things like storage.
Customer
Thank you for the honest replies. Talking with you has been a pleasure and a confirmation of what I thought was right. I dont know if you were one of the engineers working on the MDD upgrade but I only have heartfelt thanks for whoever did because the Sonnet MDX Encore Duet upgrade has seriously and utterly transformed my MDD single processor 1.25Ghz into a new computer basically, especially the dual processor aspect. I thought I had a competent Mac MDD G4 before, but now the only thing this Sonnet upgraded Mac cant do is run Intel only programs natively. All else is a breeze and multi-tasking is second nature only to running fast. And my plans were to buy a new mac in 3 years which will cost $2000+, so $650 to Sonnet for their upgrade puts me at $216 or so per year before I seriously begin to have problems with using my mac on the internet or using Apples latest MacOS, which by then may be Intel only. By then I suspect that Apple will have abandoned support of PowerPC so I will have to migrate to a new system. All in all then I will get about 7 years out of my PowerPC G4 MDD with 3 of those years made possible and pleasurable ONLY by Sonnet Technologies. Absolutely fantastic. Please thank your brilliant engineers. They did a bang up job on the L2 cache upgrade for my 6500/300 years ago and they did it again with my MDD. Now I need to think about storage solutions and new batteries for my iPod from Sonnet. One stop shopping!
By the way
I tried to rationalize your comment on how playing a game would kill a CPU in 3 months. I suspect you mean that clocking the hotter than fresh toast 7448 at 2 Ghz meant long periods of gaming at that speed in which over time the heat fried the electronics which it is the killer of anything electronic actually. I just never thought a game program would do that, but I know heat does. And this is why the 7447s were used
cooler and about the same performance, cheaper and more reliable. I do play games on my Mac like these for extended periods. Can I assume that I will not use my warranty in 3 months? I am hoping that the 7447s I have now will just keep working and working and working without failure for at least 3 years.
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
I'm not an engineer but I play one on TV. Just kidding. No, I'm just a grunt. I know a lot about Macs having used them since 1984.
I'm good friends with a lot of the programmers at Blizzard and they tell me folks will use WoW as a way of burning in a machine. It's brutal on all aspects of a computer system. CPU, RAM, HD and video card. On Blizzard's forums there is one dedicated to machine tweaking. Those are the folks that like to make the fastest possible systems because it's fun. You'll read a ton of reports about how brutal WoW can be to a machine. But I wouldn't worry about the 7447A. I've had the same single 1.8GHz in my machine at work and I occasionally play WoW at lunch time. It's still going strong.
Customer
Just a simple question further about the Encore/MDX G4 Duet upgrades for the MDD G4 PowerMacintosh Towers. I understand that there are 2 models: a 1.67 Ghz model (with a 10X multiplier of the 167 Mhz bus speed), and a 1.83 Ghz model (with an 11X multiplier of the 167 Mhz bus speed).
Simple question. Why not a 12X multiplier of the 167 Mhz bus speed model and call it a 2.004 Ghz (or basically 2 Ghz)? I bought the 1.8 Ghz model but I would have GLADLY paid more for a 2.0 Ghz duet model for my MDD. Was there a reason for not going to a nice round number of 2 Ghz? I can handle high tech details so please leter rip on the technical reasons.
My guess is cost, stability, or availability of 2 Ghz 7447A chips prevented a 2Ghz upgrade with either a 7448 or a 7447 chipset. I am pretty sure if a MDD can handle 1.8 Ghz then 2.0 Ghz should be stable too. On availability, I suspect that the 7447A chips are slightly overclocked to get 1.8 Ghz already and going to 2.0 was pushing them past reasonable stability. I know 7448A chips can go to 2.0 Ghz but maybe not 7447A chips all that well, so maybe there were not 7447A chips rated at 2 Ghz in sufficient numbers to make an upgrade.
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
We experimented with 2GHz upgrades using both 7447A and 7448 G4 chips but after extensive testing, we gave up on the project due to various problems. Mainly instability and eventual death of the product due to it being pushed too hard. 2GHz represents a massive overclocking of the CPU.
I actually got to test a 2GHz single processor upgrade based on the 7448 chip in my work machine and I killed two of them just by running some high power games on the machine. Since we couldn't guarantee that the upgrade would work for even the 1 year warranty, it was decided to kill the project.
We couldn't have done a dual 2GHz upgrade as that would have taxed the machine's ability to properly cool the machine. We mocked up a prototype and we couldn't get the machine to run without the fans running at full speed all the time and even then the machine would eventually shut down because it went over the safety limit.
And now with the switch to Intel, the Mac upgrade market is pretty much declining to zero. I suspect we'll stop selling processor upgrades once we run out of them. We won't make any more
Customer
That answered my question. But it created a new one. If 2.0 GHz is a massive overclock of the CPU as you say, then is 1.8 Ghz a modest overclock and 1.6 Ghz not at all? Just curious.
One Warranty Question:
If Sonnet is not making upgrades anymore (not manufacturing or designing them) then how will it handle in-warranty replacements if there is no inventory left? Would refunds be offered? Not that I expect my 7447A 1.8 GHz duet to fail anytime soon as I added a huge extra quiet fan to the PCI area (no PCI cards installed) to remove heat from the top of the Mac where it seemed to accumulate. I hope to get at least 3 more years of life out of my 2003 G4 tower (total of 8) before I would be okay with a CPU giving up and then having to buy new hardware. Lets just hope my power supply holds up. I use the duet 1.8 daily and only tax it 100% on rare occasions for a render but typically 60-85% drive most of the time.
Sonnet Customer Service Answer
It's a modest overclock that utilizes some physics. We buy a high temperature version of the CPU and then run it at a lower temperature. This allows the upgrade to go faster. We actually explain that in the FAQs because someone raised a huge snit over it alleging that we were doing something wrong.
I'm sure we'll be keeping upgrades around for RMA purposes. I'm not sure if you noticed that we switched to a 1-year warranty on the CPU upgrades in Jan 2007. This makes the transition to not selling upgrades easier since the 3 year warranty product is fast approaching the out of warranty state. So when did you buy your upgrade?
If your upgrade is still cranking along, it'll last for a long time. Generally failures of the CPU occur within the first few months. The single 1.8GHz upgrade I have in my work machine has been cranking along for 3+ years now. And I even play some of those CPU bashing games on it and haven't burned it out.
And planning 3 years in advance might not be the greatest idea. It's hard to predict 6 months in advance in the computing business. It's quite possible that sometime in the next 3 years, something will come out from Apple or a program you want will be released and you'll be saying "Man, I gotta have that", and then need to get completely new hardware to run that new thing. Remember that it's very likely 10.6 will be Intel only so there will be no more OS X upgrades for older machines.
My Dad uses my old beige G3 with our 1GHz ZIF in it and it's been running solidly (except for one HD failure) for over 10 years. And recently, he just asked me to get him a discount on an Intel iMac as my old beige is "too slow" for him. He wants to watch streaming video on the 'Net etc and it just doesn't have the oomph anymore.
Customer Thoughts
PowerPC G4 chips were easily available and in smallish quantities as well so making upgrades for PowerPC G4 macs was financially doable. G4s started at 350 Mhz and ended at 2 Ghz so there was also a large 1.65 Ghz range potential market of speeds to make available in an upgrade. Motorola/Freescale would always be refreshing their chips so we could get new spec models quickly out the door in an upgrade. Upgrades typically have a speed advantage over existing Apple hardware so there was a price point that worked as a business model. The G5 was a very different engineering effort and speeds started at 1.6 Ghz and ended at 2.7 Ghz, only a 1.1 Ghz range. The G5 chips cost much more and were not as conveniently available from IBM in the same way as G4s were available from Freescale. Much larger quantities were required to be bought and that meant too many of a version of a chip to sell to a much smaller market. As it was the G4 market lasted a very long time and had more Apple models utilize them. The G4 was at one point in every new Apple Mac produced from laptops to minis to towers and iMacs and eMacs. By comparison the G5 market, and the only Mac to ever have a G5 chip were the towers, seemed like a niche market and was arguably smaller. There was no reasonable financial reason to make any upgrade that used G5 chips for G5 towers because the boost would have been small but the price high. And technically speaking it was impossible to fit a G5 chip into a G4 architecture because the G5 was so closely linked in performance to its much higher front side bus, that the G4 167 Mhz bus was by all measures ridiculously too slow to feed a G5. By comparison the G3 had to deal with a 50 Mhz bus in legacy Macs which was not as bad as what the G5 would be in a G4 system. There were other technical issues as well having to do with timing of the slower memory and power requirements. The G5 required a power supply that was substantially more powerful than what most G4 systems shipped with so the "G5 upgrade" had to work with those less powerful power supplies to be fully compatible. The expense of upgrading a G4 with a G5 chip and/or also a custom power supply was insanely expensive for a crippled G5 upgraded (the slowest G5 used at 800 Mhz bus--compare that to 167Mhz on the fastest G4 bus and you get the picture). And finally and most importantly, the G5 chips produced substantially more heat due to their higher frequency and higher performance than any G4 so there was no feasible way to put a G5 into a G4 system and keep it cool without a complete redesign of the air flow. To do this in every G4 system would be a custom design per model (since all the G4 towers have slightly different air flow paths and efficiencies) and that engineering effort was just beyond ugly. It would be cheaper and smarter to buy a G5 outright than to upgrade a G4 to work with a G5 chip. A good comparison would be why we dont put diesel in our gas tanks. It just is not compatible with the engines in our cars and there is nothing we can do to bridge that incompatibility without changing out the diesel for gas or the engine completely to a diesel motor. So G4s stayed G4s, and faster with an upgrade (from Sonnet or Powerlogix, etc.), and G5s stayed G5s and faster if you bought a new Mac from Apple.
Nuff said.
