Seeking advice on G4 graphite upgrades

[Haemoglobin]

Hey everyone

Been a while since I posted here, life and family have sadly kept me away from messing with my old macs.

I was recently gifted a dual G4 450 Graphite Powermac. Now I don’t know much about this model of machine other than they made three models and I believe mine is the one up from the base model.

What I’d really like advice on, is upgrades that might contribute to general performance boost. Such as video cards. I’ve spent the passes couple of weeks looking at GPUs like the ATI 98000. Can I use a pc version of the card and just re flash it?

 

[eyoungren]

Hey everyone

Been a while since I posted here, life and family have sadly kept me away from messing with my old macs.

I was recently gifted a dual G4 450 Graphite Powermac. Now I don’t know much about this model of machine other than they made three models and I believe mine is the one up from the base model.

What I’d really like advice on, is upgrades that might contribute to general performance boost. Such as video cards. I’ve spent the passes couple of weeks looking at GPUs like the ATI 98000. Can I use a pc version of the card and just re flash it?

The FireGL X3 (flashed to Mac) is also a good card.

 

[mectojic]

I used a Radeon 8500 in my Sawtooth 500MHz G4 – with 64mb Vram. It's useful to note that you don't really need to go to the max with a video card, unless you're also going to upgrade the processor; the reason being that any game requiring 128mb Vram is obviously going to ask for at least a 1GHz processor too.

 

[ervus]

The FireGL X3 (flashed to Mac) is also a good card.

That is a good card, but I've never seen one made for AGP 2x like the Gigabit Ethernet has. I think a Radeon 9800 would be about the best video card for that computer.

To the OP: what do you plan to run? For example, with OS9 our suggestions may be different than for OS X. But there are the usual suspects for upgrades: RAM, video, CPU, disk (SSD, SATA, RAID, etc.), wireless, USB, etc. There are some sticky threads at the top of this forum with a lot of info, ideas, and pictures that you could look through.

 

[DearthnVader]

Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?

No really, tell us what software you plan to run and we can tell you what upgrades you may want to buy, but understand that this is pretty much money spent for it's nostalgic value.

You could spend enough to buy a new M1 Mini and not get 1/4 the speed or value.

Lots of people still in these old PowerPC systems for the nostalgic value.

 

[eyoungren]

Lots of people still in these old PowerPC systems for the nostalgic value.

I was never in it for that. That has changed now, but only because I moved on to Intel Macs.

At first it was due to budget, then it was due to wanting the most powerful system I could get for a cost that would have run into thousands back then. After that it was the challenge to make my systems do modern things that Apple and users of newer Macs said I could not do.

I succeeded in all of that.

I keep the systems I have now because they're cool, but with the exception of one or two of them, as they develop problems and/or fail they won't be replaced. So, yeah, now it's nostalgia - but not for what was. I LIVED through that era and USED these systems and software at work for real paying jobs. I have no desire to relive that time period.

My nostalgia is based solely on liking certain Macs that attracted me to Apple in the first place.

Just commenting on that is all.

 

[MysticCow]

Those Gigabit Ethernet G4 towers can take up to 2 GB of RAM under OS X. 9 has a hard limit of 1.5 GB that the OS will see. Start there if it isn’t maxed out.

After the RAM is maxed out, then it becomes a matter of what you’re willing to spend. I upgrade based on the Mac mini rule: if the upgrade costs some serious money, is it truly worth it compared to the cost of a very shiny Mac mini?