On May 4, 2010, at 4:01 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
On May 4, 2010, at 12:48 PM, deadwinter wrote:
I have a Rev.A Beige Desktop G3. maxed out in RAM, with the stock 4GB
HD. I upgraded the CPU to a G4, so now it's up to 500MHz. OS is
10.2.6. Strangely, with the L2 cache enabled (I'm assuming that if I
ran the Sonnet enabler and I can see it in the System profiler it's
enabled), performance has not gotten much better.
Yup. You're not going to get a whole lot better.
I am willing to
believe the real bottleneck is disk i/o,
The real bottleneck is probably a close thing between the 66 MHZ
memory bus and the slow HDD.
Upgrading the HDD will help a little, but the best visible
performance enhancement would be to stick in a better video card,
like a Radeon PCI card. When I stuck a Radeon 7000 into my Beige,
the difference was quite noticeable.
How much effort do you want to put into this? If it is to tinker as a
hobby, go for it. If it is for serious use, try and spring for an agp
G4, which will be significantly faster.
That being said, the upgrade options are the following:
Radeon 7000 or original Mac Edition will give you the most speed up
feel.
A faster/newer HD will help, but you are limited to 120GB without an
add in card. And the drive MUST be partitioned with the first
partition being 8GB or less and that has to have your 10.2 install. A
pci ATA/133 or SATA card will get you around these limits. BTW, do
you have enough free space on the disk. a 4GB disk with a 10.2
install does not have a lot of extra room, you may be getting into a
disk too full situation.
How is the speed for your processor set? Some G4s use the motherboard
jumpers and some are set by the card that actually holds the G4 chip.
If it is the Motherboard jumpers, you can easily overclock it to
533MHz. The beiges have a maximum multiplier of 8x the bus speed, so
533 is the fastest you can go. If it is on the chip, I do not know
how to overclock it.
If you have one of the early beiges, you can check the rated speed of
the Grackle (IIRC) chip. This chip is rated at either 83 or 66MHz. If
it is 66, stop here.
If it is 83, you MAY have a little room to play with. IF this is a
toy and not a Mac you have to depend on proceed with caution. You may
be able to overclock the motherboard bus speed to 83MHz, but you also
need to have pc100 or faster ram, not pc66. Here are some instructions:
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/j16.shtml
HTH,
Len
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