G4 Digital Audio Sonnet Upgrade

Yes it should be fine.

 

So it's been a while since I last uploaded, I've been away a couple of times as well as had issues getting some things I bought to work. First update is that I found a Sonnet Tempo ATA 133 Card on ebay for a really cheap price. I already had a 250GB IDE drive sat about so I put that in the G4. The sonnet card is plug and play and bootable.

The second change is that I got a Radeon 9800 Pro, I was looking for a 9700 but I lost out on a couple on ebay and this 9800 came up for a really good price. I had a lot of trouble flashing it, turns out I needed to use the -sst command in Atiflash when flashing it due to the type of Bios chip it had. After I got this worked out and got the pins taped it worked first time.



It really is a massive difference over the radeon 7000, it seems to cope with the heat so far but it is really loud. I've avoided using it on really hot days. I need to get a molex extension too as the stock right angle plug is a bit of a tight fit. Gaming performance is decent, it plays Halo and Doom 3 without too many issues, Return to Castle Wolfenstein runs great at max settings in 1600x1200 too.

I'm still not overly impressed with internet browsing performance, I'm on OSX 10.4.11 and I'm using Tenfourfox with performance tweaks but my CPU usage is really high, especially when downloading things. I've used more powerful PowerPC machines on the web in the past (G5 Dual 1.8, Dual 2.5, DC 2.0) and none struggled anywhere near this much. Obviously my G4 is a bit less powerful but any suggestions to improve performance would be appreciated. It's not my main browsing machine but it's sometimes a bit painful trying to find something online.

 

I think I'm gonna avoid overclocking the 9800, I see a lot of them going for parts on ebay as I understand they are from a time when the solder had a habit of going bad. I reckon my CPU would bottleneck much more performance anyway. I am watching a card with an arctic cooler at the minute so I may pick one up just to keep it a bit cooler.

I am maxed out in terms of ram (1.5GB), I've thought about an SSD although I'd need a SATA card, I kind of want to keep to roughly period correct components too. I do have a 120GB SSD sat on my desk doing nothing so it is tempting. I may pick up a second 80GB WD800 drive and make my boot drives a raid 0 array, would only cost me about £5.

 

Is there anything special about running raid 0 on g4s? I tried to clone my OS drive on to a pair of WD800 drives running off my Sonnet Tempo ATA 133 IDE card but when I try to boot from the raid array it gets stuck at the apple logo. I'm going to try a fresh install on the raid array, is there anything else I should try?

I know about the risks of losing data but this is more of a project build than anything, I'm currently running tiger but I may move to leopard and get time machine set up.

 

Thanks, I won't worry about time machine then.

 

More Updates:

Got a Dual 1.8GHz Sonnet in a Quicksilver (was pretty beaten up) so decided to swap it in to this. One of the fans on the new Sonnet has bad bearings so I'll need to swap it at some point but it was a plug and play swap and booted third time (boot looped twice at first).


Also went with a raid boot drive setup just to experiment, wouldn't work in 10.4 (got stuck at boot) but worked first time in 10.5. So I now have 2 x WD800 as a 160GB OS Array and then a Single WD2500 as 250GB of storage.


I also got a Sonnet USB 2.0 card, probably one of the most expensive things I've bought for this but I wanted a Sonnet one to match the CPU and IDE Controller. Got a nice selection of ports on the back now, I'm hoping I don't push the power supply too far.