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Got a free Power Mac 8600/200 - With a G4 Card!

A

applefan1997

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 2, 2005
423
2
Koreatown, Los Angeles, California
I picked this up for free today at my local thrift store, because they couldn't test it and I guess it didn't appear to have value. I took it home, and noticed the purple processor card, so after I opened it, noticed it was a Sonnet Crescendo G4/400! It has maxed out VRAM (4MB), and 160MB or so of RAM. It does have the AV card so I was able to use it with my TV. It boots OS 9.1, and has 2 HD's, both 4GB. What is something like this worth?
 
applefan1997 said:
I picked this up for free today at my local thrift store, because they couldn't test it and I guess it didn't appear to have value. I took it home, and noticed the purple processor card, so after I opened it, noticed it was a Sonnet Crescendo G4/400! It has maxed out VRAM (4MB), and 160MB or so of RAM. It does have the AV card so I was able to use it with my TV. It boots OS 9.1, and has 2 HD's, both 4GB. What is something like this worth?
Click to expand...

Nice! The g4 card by itself is worth ~$20-60.... and 4gb SCSI 50 pin hard drives are getting hard to come by...
 
I'm not sure what it is worth as far as resell value, but that system would be enough of a foundation for me to make a living off of if starting out from scratch. I mean throw in a good 8 MB video card (so the 4 MB of VRAM is strictly used for video capture), and either add a larger SCSI hard drive or an ATA card and ATA drive, and you would have a great system for use with Strata Videoshop 3.0, 4.0 or Adobe Premiere 5.1. It would most likely be quite a bit faster at that type of stuff than my 8600 with a G3/450 in it because G4s can encode video at almost twice the rate as a G3 at the same clock speed.

Really, the sky is the limit with that system as far as usability... putting zero money into software you could turn it into a nice graphic design or video editing system, but because most people assume that it is too old to do anything they wouldn't see any value in it.
 
RacerX said:
I'm not sure what it is worth as far as resell value, but that system would be enough of a foundation for me to make a living off of if starting out from scratch. I mean throw in a good 8 MB video card (so the 4 MB of VRAM is strictly used for video capture), and either add a larger SCSI hard drive or an ATA card and ATA drive, and you would have a great system for use with Strata Videoshop 3.0, 4.0 or Adobe Premiere 5.1. It would most likely be quite a bit faster at that type of stuff than my 8600 with a G3/450 in it because G4s can encode video at almost twice the rate as a G3 at the same clock speed.

Really, the sky is the limit with that system as far as usability... putting zero money into software you could turn it into a nice graphic design or video editing system, but because most people assume that it is too old to do anything they wouldn't see any value in it.
Click to expand...

Yeah.... they are awesome machines! I have a 9600 I bought a few years ago and upgraded the crap out of....

-1gb (yes 1gb) memory
-2x 9.1gb SCSI drives in a RAID
-1x 4gb boot drive
- Yamaha CD burner
-g3 400mhz CPU
-ATi Rage 128
-Running OS 9.1

It is still a very usable system. Up until I got my g4 last year I was still using the 9600 for Photoshop 6.0 work!
 
Not to revive an old thread... oh wait, I am... *anyway*

Out of curiosity, are you still getting some pretty good use out of this machine these days? Or is it, like my beige G3, just sitting there unused for the most part.
 
sorry to hijack...

AppleFan1997, you mentioned in a post a while back that you had successfully rebuilt a Clamshell iBook battery. Is that correct? Would you mind answering some questions I have about the process? Thanks.
 
im_to_hyper said:
Not to revive an old thread... oh wait, I am... *anyway*

Out of curiosity, are you still getting some pretty good use out of this machine these days? Or is it, like my beige G3, just sitting there unused for the most part.
Click to expand...


Yeah...unfortunately I don't have enough practical uses to keep it on my desk. For a while I had it running Photoshop 5 with a Mac OS X style OS 9.2 theme, but now it has moved to my closet until I find a new use for it. If I remember correctly I had 512mb ram in it....not bad considering it shipped with 32mb originally :D
 
macEfan said:
Yeah.... they are awesome machines! I have a 9600 I bought a few years ago and upgraded the crap out of....

-1gb (yes 1gb) memory
-2x 9.1gb SCSI drives in a RAID
-1x 4gb boot drive
- Yamaha CD burner
-g3 400mhz CPU
-ATi Rage 128
-Running OS 9.1

It is still a very usable system. Up until I got my g4 last year I was still using the 9600 for Photoshop 6.0 work!
Click to expand...

Have one with nearly identical specs, the two 9.1 HDs at 10,000 rpm. Oh yeah, the Yamaha was the guts of an external LaCie that I stuck in a drive bay. The Photoshop is 5.5 I think. And the extra boot drive is only 2gb.

I tried out 10.1 with it as well with XPostFacto but I had to pull all my extra PCI cards and match the RAM to work it.

It's sitting idle but I kept it.
 
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