G3 uprage cards

i went through the same dillema, ended up buying a 500 AGP Graphics g4 powermac for 200 bucks. best move i coulda made. way better video support all around (wolfenstien/castle plays great). the prob with the g3 is you spend for zif upgrade, then your video sucks, buy a video card, and you've out spent what it would cost to get another macine. better yet is you get a hard drive and some ram to boot! use the b&w as a server or 2nd machine, or sell it to one of your friends who has a pc thats all loaded down with viruses and such for what you can upgrade to the g4 machine for. (thats what i did. lol)

i will say that i have a 500mhz g4 upgrade zif, and a radeon 7000. its not as fast as i thought it would be at all. buy a G4 with agp atleast and you will be much happier.

Daystar's XLR8 G4 ZIF's are pretty good. Fast cache and they've got jumpers on the ZIF and the software's decent. You could probably pick up a used 550mhz for a cheap enough price at the auctions sites, but when you're going for 1Ghz, yeah, for the money, you might think of an AGP G4 instead.

i would get it if its free you never can go wrong with free.

i put a G4 400mhz cpu out of a yikes in my in my beige G3 AIO but wouldent see the L2 cache on the CPU so it was slow but some of the test's was on power with GBE G4 my friend own's BTW a PCI video card from ATI goes up to a radeon 9200 Mac edition 128mb vram and the pci slot in the B&W and yikes is running at 66mhz which is agp 1x speed you are not going to see much of a improvement from the B&W and sawtooth it will be hardly notesable. the only thing about the B&W and yikes is that it has the mpc106 gracle chip that if you have a G4 cpu over 600 mhz you have to lower the bus to 66mhz

I've no experience with the Sonnet G4's, but there's always some up for auction at eBay, and rarely any XLR8s, so I don't know if that's because people want to get rid of their Sonnets or because there's simply a lot more Sonnets out there, but either way, a B&W doing 500mhz with a Radeon or an ATI Rage is a happy machine. I'm quite satisfied with mine, but I don't play games or anything else too intensive except Photoshop. It all depends on what you want to do with it, of course. You could always get the B&W for now and sell it later and put the money toward a G4.

i agree with free....

i just checked http://www.powermax.com/
$739 for a 5oomhz sawtooth with 256mb of ram
27gb hdd
and ati rage 128pro graphics. yeah right mabe $200.

Powermax is for suckers. Seriously.

eBay prices for low-end G4 towers are in the $200 to low $300 range, and that's also the price you're likely to pay in a personal transaction. (A quick look at eBay shows a number of 400-466Mhz AGP towers with "Buy it Now!"-s of $250, if you don't want to bid and want a ready source.) G4 ZIF upgrades run $100-$200. Getting the whole computer is a lot more "bang for the buck", when you factor in how much *better* the rest of the machine is.

That said, if you're just looking for a PowerPC to play with, take the free B&W and use it how it is. It won't be much faster with an upgrade anyway.

And yes, Macs are overpriced, and yes, that seems ironic when in fact, yes, PowerPCs are cheaper to produce then Intel CPUs.

--Peace

If you do buy an upgrade, just get the G3, as G4 doesnt always make it better... plus you dont have to upgrade the firmware to use the g3. less pain to go through if something doesnt work right.

yeah i would go for the 900mhz, 1ghz g3 upgrade

You won't see much difference between a G3 and a G4 for most apps so get a faster G3. Plus, some of the G4's (600MHz & faster I think) drop the bus speed on B&W's to 66MHz. The G3's do not IIRC.

I got a Yikes 400MHz G4 in my B&W and it's still slower than the 450MHz G3 in the GF's B&W even in Photoshop. I still have the OEM ATI Rage in mine which makes a difference in OS X (slower) compared to the Mac Edition Radeon in the 450.

You can make the B&W a decent running Mac with a little patience and a few bucks. Just watch eBay or subscribe to the LEM Swaplist. eBay is not a bad place to buy stuff but you need to do a little work like checking the seller out and making sure it's refundable or can be exchanged. It's still the best source for used parts.

i put a G4 400mhz cpu out of a yikes in my in my beige G3 AIO but wouldent see the L2 cache on the CPU so it was slow

You need to download the driver from Daystar or XLR8 or Sonnet to activate the cache. And it's free. You can't go wrong with free

nope ive tryed that already. every time the cache enabler progie's extention it would freeze when the ATI accelarator extention would load. the sonnet one would just not load at all saying this is not there CPU. So i just bought a G3 450 mhz cpu and currently have it set to 466/66 and runs great.

I use an XLer8 G$ 500 mhz Zif and a Radeon 9000 video card and I have had no problems with it. My G4 B&W runs great!

this is a Yikes G4 cpu. im just going to keep it in the Yikes mobo and try to find a yikes G4 case with PSU and front board. My beige G3 it fine with the G3 466mhz for now