Yikes Powermac G4 Opinions / Comments

[KBFinFan]

So on the Classifieds section someone was looking to trade their old Yikes G4(Powermac G4 "Yikes" 400 mhz ) for a PC. I offered mine as a trade 1.4Ghz Athlon beastie. You can look up the thread if you want..I just didn't link it as I didn't want to step on anyone's foot or whatnot.

Here's my question (and again no offense to the person looking for the trade):

How does the Yikes compare to the later AGP G4s as far as expandability?

In its stock form with 16MB of video ram I assume it cannot perform certain QuartzExtreme tasks such as Expose?

Overall my question really is will this thing be fun to play around with when I have a new 1.25Ghz 15" AlBook? Does it run OS X at a good clip for things like internet surfing? Word processing? It also cannot run airport, I think I read that somewhere?

I wanted a desktop Mac just to play around with and wondered if this would be 'fun' or just a dissapointment?

Any other words of wisdom would be appreciated...(such as save up for a cube!)

Thanks as always

 

[thehuncamunca]

there won't be an AGP slot so you really can't upgrade the graphics card, you could get a better PCI one but would be limited by the PCI bandwidth
if you install enough ram in it (512mb +) it should run mac OS X fine
you could add a 3rd party wireless thru pci or USB, could also jazz it up with a few hard drives or other cheap upgrades

 

[MoparShaha]

As thehuncamunca stated, the only downside is really the lack of AGP. That Power Mac will still run OS X decently. Just make sure you put enough RAM in. 256 MB minimum, but I'd get 512 MB. You'll be able to run everything smoothly except games.

 

[straphound]

I would stay away from the "yikes" models. They are basically a blue and white logic board with a g4 dumped in them. Besides not supporting airport or AGP, they are limited in regards to their processor upgrades as well. Many of the upgrades that you see (check out OWC for example) require a sawtooth or digital audio model to work.

Check this out:
http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/g4.shtml

It gets a "road apple" Not good.

 

[MoparShaha]

While I whole heartedly agree with straphound about the weaknesses of the Yikes Power Mac, if you're just buying it as a toy to tinker with, it'll do just fine. From what I gather, this is just going to be a secondary machine which you have no plans of upgrading. Being such, I think it will fit the bill nicely.

 

[crap freakboy]

currently running 10.3.2 with a PM G4 400Mhz, ATI 16mb and 1.19Gb ram....runs very smoothly IMO so dont be told otherwise, granted its not as fast as a G5 Dualie....but then again what is?
Oh, and expose does work, no problem.

 

[ntg]

I just picked up a 64Mb PCI Graphics card for my old B&W G3/400 (virtually the same board!), and put a 7200rpm drive inside.
Now for most everyday stuff it 'appears' as fast as a G4/400, and my father uses it for digital photo editing and printing (3500+ images so far) and all the iPhoto work (and Photoshop if needed) is handled beautifully by the Quartz Extreme, Panther and the new card.

It surprised the hell out of me, but now he doesn't want to upgrade to a new iMac, because he can't see the point since the G3 is now fast enough.

 

[wordmunger]

I'm chugging along fine in my TiBook 400 running panther. Even Expose works, with only 8 MB vram. I suspect your desktop G4 will perform even better than this one. I'm planning on using this as my primary computer for 6 months to a year (I'll probably cave and get a PBG5 when they come out).

 

[oingoboingo]

Originally posted by ntg
I just picked up a 64Mb PCI Graphics card for my old B&W G3/400 (virtually the same board!), and put a 7200rpm drive inside.
Now for most everyday stuff it 'appears' as fast as a G4/400, and my father uses it for digital photo editing and printing (3500+ images so far) and all the iPhoto work (and Photoshop if needed) is handled beautifully by the Quartz Extreme, Panther and the new card.

It surprised the hell out of me, but now he doesn't want to upgrade to a new iMac, because he can't see the point since the G3 is now fast enough.

Quartz Extreme requires an AGP video card to work, unless you've done a bit of hacking to enable PCI support in the drivers.

I'd be interested to see iPhoto running well on a G3/400. It runs like crap on my 1.6GHz G5 with less than 1000 photos in the library, which could be the major reason for improved speed being Apple's #1 selling point of the new iPhoto 4.0. They knew iPhoto performance was a dog. Maybe we just have different expectations of what 'handled beautifully' is.

 

[kettle]

Originally posted by oingoboingo
I'd be interested to see iPhoto running well on a G3/400. It runs like crap on my 1.6GHz G5 with less than 1000 photos in the library, which could be the major reason for improved speed being Apple's #1 selling point of the new iPhoto 4.0.

I still think they should release a fix for iPhoto 2, if you have to pay for it now, it wouldn't hurt making the less featured V.2 work in a useful manner. It's not so much the slowness ofthe yikes G4 as much as the soup that is expected to run on it. I bet iPhoto 4 will fly on it extra features or not.

I have found less and less reason to upgrade my 450 sawtooth the better that OSX has become, I put an ATi 8500 in to use quartz extreme and upped the drive sizes but it's basically a really good work horse. I think there is a hack to enable Quartz extreme on a PCI bus, I think a 32MB card might help aswell, even just a little.

 

[oingoboingo]

Originally posted by kettle


I have found less and less reason to upgrade my 450 sawtooth the better that OSX has become, I put an ATi 8500 in to use quartz extreme and upped the drive sizes but it's basically a really good work horse. I think there is a hack to enable Quartz extreme on a PCI bus, I think a 32MB card might help aswell, even just a little.

Yeah, there is a hack to allow a PCI video card to use Quartz Extreme. Check out www.xlr8yourmac.com for details; they have very good write ups on this type of thing. The speedups aren't always what people are expecting though. There is some speculation that the PCI bus becomes overloaded with data traffic when the video card is churning away and something else (say an ATA/66 card) needs to access the hard drive. Give it a go though...in addition to the 1.6GHz G5 and a 12" PowerBook I have a PowerMac 7600 which has seen quite a bit of 'unofficial' upgrading. Squeezing every last bit of usefullness from old hardware can be fun.

I just don't expect it'll run iPhoto2 particularly well ;-)