Which G4 Upgrade ?

[Sargiel]

I bought a Digital Audio Powermac a few months back and have been slowly been bringing her up to spec adding 1GB of RAM, a 9800 Pro 128mb, Firmtek SATA card and MAXLINE 250GB 16mb cache HDD, 5 port USB 2 card etc

I had been holding off on upgrading the processor from the single 533 currently installed in the hope that we'd see the 7448 in the new powerbooks and subsequently a 7448 upgrade for G4 Powermacs. However that didn't happen and I'm unsure how much longer it will take for an upgrade to become available.

So it looks like my choices are down to either Fastmac's 7445 based 1.467 GHz or Gigadesigns 2.0Ghz 7447. While they both look like they will give a nice boost to my system I want to know which is better for gaming ? I know that people are saying the 2mb L3 cache in the 7445 is worth 300mhz or so but in that case the 2.0Ghz 7447 will pull ahead in terms of gaming performance ?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be very much appreciated

 

[krimson]

try xlr8yourmac.com's G4 upgrade page (game page), it may have the info you're looking for.

 

[Sargiel]

Well just as an update I've also just ordered my own copy of Mac OS X Tiger (the DA was an eBay purchase with 10.3 installed so it was just a matter of time before I bought my own copy of Mac OS X)

I've also been googling like mad and have tracked down the Mac Bidouille review of Gigadesigns 2.0 7447 but they didn't do any game related benchmarks so, while interesting in general, it wasn't much use to me.

krimson: thanks for the link to those benchmarks

Anyone else care to chip in as to what is better for gaming ? 2mb L3 or just Mhz all the way ?

 

[Sweetfeld28]

the more cache you can get on the processor you want, the better.

The cache is built on to the processor to store largly used info., like where things are on your hd [not sure about this, just trying to give you some kind of an idea]. Or basically, instructions.