On Aug 3, 2004, at 01:21 pm, Tom W. wrote:
I am very interested in hearing feedback from people who have upgraded their B&W with either a G4 or G3 upgrade. I have a G4-500 in my B&W and am pondering a further upgrade, but am not quite sure whether to go with a bigger sonnet upgrade or a powerlogix g3-900 or 1gig. I do encode dvds so I know the altivec is a good thing to have on G4, but I would also like some faster gaming speed without suffering the bus drop to 66mhz that Sonnet does to their high end G4 upgrades.
As far as I managed to establish only Sonnet's Encore ZIF G4/1GHz upgrade drops the bus speed to 66MHz. This is to get around the issues of the PCI controller on the B&W not tolerating CPUS that run that fast. No Apple conspiracy, just the fact that a 1GHz CPU was almost unheard of when the B&W was designed and thus the PCI controller does pretty well to cope as it is. That said how you can get a 1GHz G3 to work and not a 1GHz G4 beats me...
IIRC you can get Sonnet G4 upgrades up to 900MHz that still use a 100MHz bus.
I am always of the opinion that if you use OS X a lot then a G4 is way more viable as the operating system's main frameworks (mostly the Apple bits not the BSD bit AFAIK) is optimised for Altivec acceleration. This gives a huge boost to the GUI functions and makes the OS a whole lot nicer to use. I know the difference between a 400MHz G3 and a 500MHz G4 is pretty astounding. O'course this doesn't always help in application programs as they are most often not Altivec optimised, but games based on the Quake III Mac engine are, as well as the UT2003 & 2004 Mac engines I suspect.
-- Mark Benson
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