Processor upgrade recommendations?

Save your money.

Sell your G4 when the new g5 PM is released.

And use you Edu discount where possible.

Apple CPU upgrades are just too damed expensive, upgrade your RAM, HD and graphic card yes but the CPU costs too much and you would be in a much better position buying a brand new Mac with all the system upgrades that come with it.

 

A upgrade will give it new life, go for it. You wont need to bother with a new machine for years. Its why a lot of us own Powermacs because you can upgrade and still have performance of a new machine. My old quicksilver has a upgrade and can still out perform almost any new mac except the new powermacs.

 

I suppose each person has to weigh up the pros and cons of a CPU upgrade.

To me the cost is too great, yes having a 1.7Ghz G4 is groovy but with a G5 your getting..

Dual CPU's
Faster Sytem bus
Faster memory
Bigger memory cap
SATA
PCI E on the new G5's
Better Graphic's Card
FW 800
USB 2
DVD Writer
Built in BT as an option
and a Very Cool Case, in more ways than 1!

Not to mention the possability of a
2 BUTTON MOUSE??

And Tiger, iLife 05.

Its simply better value for money in my book.

Of course when you become attached to your Mac its difficult to let him/her go!

The reason i still have my old 1st Gen iMac

 

If you decide to upgrade, don't get the 1.7GHZ. It has greatly reduced cache. With an older system like that, you want more cache. Go for the 1.4GHZ, It's speed is comparable/better than a 1.7ghz. Do some research and you'll see.

 

I should be able to upgrade my Sawtooth right?

it's a G4 400 (agp graphics)

anyone know how much i can upgrade it?

 

I have a sawtooth too and as far as I know, you can put as fast as a processor that you want. Just remember that the sawtooth has a 100mhz bus and is a major bottleneck in performance.

You can put a maximum of 1.5 gigs of RAM in it.

It has a 2x AGP bus which is slow compared to modern standards, but www.macsales.com sells two video cards compatible for this.

It has an ATA-66 bus which is pretty slow if you're going to do major gaming or video work (but why would you do that with a sawtooth anyway?) This is easily fixed with a PCI card that you install which can give you ATA-100, 150 or SATA.

That's all I can think of. With sawtooth computers, they can be upgraded, but just remember that there are major bottleneck issues.

PS: HA! Love the april fools joke...Town Clerk.

 

Well -- i cut my teeth with video editing on this thing ... i have SCSI hard drives so i don't need to worry about SATA

i've just want to be able to use RT with final cut pro

i'm kinda in the same boat as the other guy -- i'll be picking up a powerbook in a few months --- I NEED the portability --- but just want to get a little more out this thing -- it's frustrating waiting for effects to render each time i want to see what it looks like

 

Wow you're brave. I've used Final Cut on my mac and it's SOOO slow rendering frames.

If you're getting a powerbook, why upgrade the Sawtooth? But if you want to upgrade, I'm sure you'll see a significant boost.

 

I upgraded my 350 Mhz Sawtooth to 1 Ghz with a Sonnet card recently for $229. That was worth it. In your case I think I would just sell it and get a G5. $450 just seems like too much to be worth it. Especially if you only plan on using it another 6 months.

 

Dual processors be the wave of the future.. garrrrh!

 

If you do decide to upgrade your G4, avoid the upgrades with the 7447 processor (i.e. everything above 1.5 GHz). The upgrades with a 7455 or 7457 CPU are just as fast because they have L3 cache, and are cheaper.

The only advantage from the 7447 is low power consumption, but in the tower this isn't an issue. Barefeats has benchmarks that show that a 1.3GHz G4 with L3 cache is slightly faster than 1.6,1.7 and 1.8GHz G4s without L3 cache. My recommendation: Get an OWC 1.4GHz 7455 with L3 cache.

 

For games, you won't notice much (if any) difference at all except in Quake 3 which was written to take advantage of dual CPUs. Surfing the net and using stuff like Office will see no benefit from the dual processors. You will see a difference when doing heavy work in Photoshop, and there will be a modest performance increase from the duals when ripping/encoding in iTunes, iMovie or iDVD. Other Pro applications like Final Cut Pro will see a performance increse from the duals as well.

I've hemmed and hawed about getting a dual upgrade myself - My dual 533 does use both of it's processors when I'm using the iLife suite - but I'm not convinced that the increased price justifies the smallish performance gain. Unless you are regularly making DVDs, handling big files in Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, I'd go with a single processor 7455 or 7457.

Check Barefeats' Killer Kube comparison, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The single 1.5 7457 and dual 1.3 7457 beat the faster clocked 7447s. The Power Logix upgrades are essentially the same as OWC, they just use a 7457 unstead of a 7455.

 

Hmm, I don't know much about Logic - since it is pro-level software written by Apple I would guess that it would benefit from dual CPUs, but I'm not sure by any means. Dual or not, any CPU upgrade you get will really make a huge difference.

 

Well i've been using Final Cut Pro since version 1.2

i upgraded to version 4 and OS X for the color correction -- it takes a long time for stuff to get done yes BUT --- i usually do everything first ... then render ... and go out or watch a movie ---

i know that may see like a weird way to do things ... BUT my background is Linear and then i moved to non-linear -- the importance of planning out everything before i do my edits is a huge part ... so i USUALLY get exactly what i'm after -- with occasional mishaps ... plus i work in nested sequences so i will break a long project up a lot and what ever is done will be rendered and then it is just a question of nesting it in the final thing ... Really not a HUGE deal

plus the powerbook thing is really up in the air -- and i have A LOT of projects this summer ... so i want to kick it up a bit