Is there a possible way to daisy chain a Powermac G3 and G4(early G4 that has G3 PCI motherboard) to make one computer out of both? Basically combining both of there powers to form one better computer. I've seen it done with some old Dell PC's, I would like to know if I can do it with two G3's.
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I think that what you are getting at is clustering. I believe that you can do it with linux (not sure how though - but know that it is doable at least on the x86 platform).
That is basically what I want to do. I want to know if there is any certain devices needed to do this.
Here is a good place to start looking at Mac clustering info. Pooch looks neat.
What are you intending to do with your cluster? Keep in mind only clustering applications will take advantage of this setup. Neither the OS nor standard applications will see the other CPU.
I was intending to make a faster Mac out of the two, the G3 is at 450 MHz, the G4 is at 350 MHz, I wanted to get to 800 MHz to run some apps smoothly without them crashing most of the time. My G5 is fast, 1.6 GHz, but I'm currently not doing anything with these to old machines, and I want to see if it works. That's really it.
To answer your question, no, you can't just stick a 450MHz and a 350MHz machine together to make a 800MHz machine. As stated above... if you are running apps that support distributed processing, you can go that route, but... unless you are running apps that specifically support distributed processing, there isn't much point.
The issue is the difference between possible, feasible and practical. It is possible to get the two machines to work together, but it's not really feasible for what you seem to want to do. In terms of practical use, it'd be easier and cheaper to find a faster G4 to replace both the towers with.
Think the others have pretty much answered your question so,
the good news and not so good news.....
The G3 sounds like it could have been the server version as they came in the 450mhz flavour. Does it have SCSI drives and card in it? If so it could make a dandy networked junkbox.
The G4, sounds like the first generation G4 called "yikes". if it doesn't have an Airport card slot that's what you got. There are aftermarket CPU upgrade cards out there but honestly I tried that on a 350 a while ago and found it was crash prone. The bright side if there is one is that the CPU upgrade cards for the Yikes should work with your G3 450...
Is it worth it, I'd be hard pressed to say yes givin the moderate speed bump vs finding a clean G4 DP 500 or better....
I might try Linux on that G4 though.
Kevin
I was thinking that you might be able to grab a dual processor from a mystic and put it in that g4 for cheap on ebay. it should be compatible if its a sawtooth if he gets the heatsinks too, right? my g4/500 dual is plenty fast enough for everything but gaming... and I suspect thats partly because I have the stock video card in... I wonder how a radeon 9800 would do in there... I guess the thing is to figure out if it's a Yikes! with pci slots only or if it's a sawtooth with AGP.