
What's this? Two boxes.... Maybe it's a tower and a display?

Okay, first box opening reveals a Graphite G4 beast!

Wait? Two Graphite beasts! Ahh.. so that's what he means by "One better".
(I had to check the shipping tags to make sure they were both intended for me)

Both units are in excellent condition and the seller threw in a set of Apple Extended USB keyboards, Mighty Mice, new, unused power cables (Looks like the iMac variety) and 2x VGA + 2x DVI cables.
Considering I spent $25 the last time I had to buy a DVI cable at Officeworks, this is great value!

Unit A to the left reveals a 350Mhz G4 w/ 1MB L2 Cache, 2x 64MB PC100 SDRAM DIMMs and an AGP Rage 128 Pro (16MB). No Airport card and the 56k modem has been stripped.

We have a 20GB 5400rpm spinner.

Unlike other Rage 128 cards I've seen, these ones include a small cooling fan (and DVI+VGA out).

To the right, we have... Exactly the same config! Except, the modem port is still attached to the chassis (the modem has been removed though).

Ok, this 6GB clunker is not factory Sawtooth hardware. It could have been pulled from a B&W G3 or iMac. The date stamp is early '99.
Everything looks the part. I took both units into the backyard to blast out the dust.
Time to boot... Flashing question marks all round. I confirm they both have 6x DVD-ROM drives. But, the drive in the second tower is faulty.
In goes the Tiger DVD in the first unit:

What's this? It didn't like Tiger. So I try a Panther CD instead and get through okay.
Panther installed perfectly fine (after some time). I spent the next hour or so running all of the software updates. Panther sure took it's time to "Optimize" itself after installing software.
The faulty DVD-ROM drive took a trip to my tear-down station. The tray refused to eject and when manually ejected, it wouldn't lock back into place. The internal tray mechanism wasn't activating the center spindle and laser body when pushed in. After watching a few YouTube videos on how to fix old optical drives, I had it stripped right down and a simple removal of the tray and a reinsert clicked everything back into place and got it working again. It was a good chance to blow out all of the dust too.
I juggled some of the RAM and also found a 64MB PC133 DIMM in my collection to throw in as well. Now, Unit A has 256MB, unit B 64MB. I updated the firmware on both units to 4.2.8f1 which resolved the Tiger DVD issue and allowed FireWire TDM, which didn't appear to work previously. With both DVD drives working, I have been having some fun trialing out different obscure systems.
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Mac OS 8.6 (via a Sawtooth Restore iso) - I was
finally able to install a fully supported 8.6 system! Being such a lightweight OS, I put it on the G4 with 64MB RAM. One bonus I found with 8.6 on this Mac is that the processor cycling option is available in the Energy Saver control panel, whereas OS9.2.2 didn't list any options and I can only assume ran at full power draw constantly. I can only gauge this by reading the CPU temps in Gauge Pro. OS 8.6 when idle was sitting at 34°C, whereas OS 9.2.2 was around 40°C. I have installed Photoshop 6.0.1, QuarkXPress 4.1 and PrintToPDF. I intend to do some quick design prototypes on the old beast, just to put it to use. For fun, I also setup Hotline Server 1.9.1 and connected in with Hotline Client 1.2.3 via Sheepshaver on my Mac Pro. I installed VNC and also configured ARD 1.2, but Remote Desktop Admin v3.x for OS X refuses to connect and I can't for the life of me find an old version of ARD Admin which will. Timbuktu Pro is next to go on.
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Mac OS X Developer Preview 2 -
Successfully installed DP2 on the G4 with 64MB of RAM. It is interesting and severely limited, but what a hybrid of an OS! There is so much unrefined tech crammed in here and yet it's made to look and feel like Classic Mac OS. I fired up the Developer tools (Project Builder/Interface Builder), which unsurprisingly looks almost identical to running Project Builder/Interface Builder under GnuStep in Ubuntu/Debian. I tried to build a test app but couldn't quite connect the dots. It seems like applicationDidFinishLaunching: wasn't a valid App delegate method at this stage? (or maybe I made a mistake). The developer documentation was very light-on and there is zero auto-complete like in modern Xcode. I had some fun and experienced a few 'crashes', then wiped the OS for something a little more solid:
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Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 - I setup this Rhapsody based OS with the NeXT-ish theme. It looks great and is rock solid. I also like that the Classic/MacOS environment was 8.6 instead of 9.x. I'll need to play around with it some more and try out some older Cocoa apps to see what's compatible. I haven't put the Dev tools on there yet. My understanding of early OS X timeline is a bit vague, did Server 1.2v3 come out before the OS X DPs?
On the G4 with 256MB, I've set up
Panther,
Tiger and
OS 9.2.2. Tiger performance is surprisingly really great considering the CPU clock speed and lack of Core Image/Quartz Extreme support with the Rage 128 Pro. I can see a massive speed difference between this and my Pismo G3 400Mhz, even though they share the same bus and RAM speed. Gauge Pro had the memory throughput clocked at ~250MB/sec on the G4, whereas the Pismo was sub 100MB/sec.
So, what kind of upgrades should I go for?
I've already ordered an AU$18 (free to ship) "DIMM bundle" from interstate. A collection of 8x untested PC133 modules in varying sizes which should arrive next week. It looked like there were a few 256MB and 128MB modules in there. This should be good enough. I really don't want to spend $20 a piece on 512MB DIMMs.
Digging through my collection of graphics cards I have the perfect candidate: An
ATI Radeon 9700 128MB AGP 4x, but alas I have no AGP based PC to flash it in. I have been hunting around and it looks like the only Mac OS-based flashable card was the 8500 (Apparently you just put the ATI update in the startup items folder). Does anybody know of another solution here? I think my wife wouldn't be happy if another big box showed up on the doorstep with a dusty old PC in it.
The next thing is to combat the noise (and slowness) of the old spinners. I'm thinking of putting either 16GB or 32GB mSATA SSDs in these. To keep costs down, I think it would be sufficient to use a solution WITHOUT a Sonnet SATA card.
e.g. 16GB mSATA SSD (AU$24) -> mSATA to SATA Adapter (AU$5) -> SATA to 3.5" IDE Adapter (AU$6)
The alternative is a cheap 7200rpm SATA HDD. 2011 stock WD Blue 160GB drives are going for about AU$19 (+ the AU$6 IDE adapter). I spotted a 5 pack of these HDDs for AU$70, which might be good as a software RAID (2 in each G4), plus a spare. Would striped RAID throughput be any better on the existing ATA bus over the single mSATA SSD or am I complicating things for the old Mac?
In conclusion...
So, the twins are the latest addition to my (quickly) growing PowerPC collection... I really love these old Macs. It takes me back to when they were considered "Super Computers" and really rocked the computing world.
Both machine's share nearly identical SN's and are marked as being built in week 50 of '99. Two weeks before the world ended due to the Millennium Bug!
EDIT: In terms of CPU upgrades, what is the best option? I haven't seen many second hand upgrade cards available. I don't _need_ to upgrade the CPU, but I'm curious about it. Is the Sawtooth G4 limited to the older square-shaped cards only? I don't think pushing past 1Ghz would be any good considering the bus and RAM speed, but more importantly I really just don't want to add any extra heat.
It's 36°C outside today and it's not even summer yet!