[Sneaky Snake]

I'm being offered a dual 450 MHz G4 Tower with 1 GB of RAM and 15" Sony CRT for $50, which I'm definitely gonna buy. I'm gonna use OWC for most of my upgrades but noticed that they did not have any video card upgrade options for that computer. Was the ATI 9800 XT out for the G4 tower (AGP graphics) or was it only the G5. I would love this computer as my tinkering mac, and would to drop a good GPU to play Halo and possibly Star Wars Battlefront.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

-Snake

[teflon]

Only for the G5.
The best card you can get for a reasonable price would be the 9800 Pro flashed from PC (XT has issues). Its tricky to do, but you can flash it yourself blind using OS 9. I did that a few years back for a G4 tower like yours. Is also recommend getting one of the double wide cards, so that its got decent ventilation, since that is the single biggest flaw with the G4 case, not enough air going through, especially if you upgrade you CPU.

see here for more flashing.

and before tBC gets too excited, its not the nudity kind.

[Sneaky Snake]

Thanks

and where did you get the parts to upgrade your Cube?

[Frost]

PowerMac G4 upgrading, now THERE'S something I know a lot about. Damn near nothing in my G4/733 is original.

Far as CPU, my best recommendation would be the NewerTech 7448s available from OWC. Do not get 7447s, the performance hit when gaming compared to a similarly clocked 7455 (what they come with standard) is just huge. 7457s (you'll only get these off the gray market. They were awesome and FAST for gaming, but only PowerLogix made them, and you can't buy them new anymore) and 7448s are the only way to go. One thing to note if you find a 7457, though, is A) you'll need to update the firmware for compatibility so make sure the original discs and instructions are included, and B) sleep will not work. So a 7448 is probably your best bet.

GPU, the main question is do you want to be able to play OS9 games. If you want to be able to run OS9 games with graphics acceleration, your best option is the Apple-branded GeForce 4 Ti4600. They usually pop up on eBay with some regularity. That'll give you the best you can get for OS9 games and full OS9 compatibility, while still running fast enough to play pre-Doom 3 games at a good framerate in OSX.

If you don't care about OS9, you can jump all the way to a reflashed 7800 GS AGP via eBay if you've got the cash. Otherwise looking for a Mac Radeon 9800 would probably be good too, and cheaper.

One concern before upgrading the CPU is to find out what model the superdrive is. If it's a DVR-103, you'll need a new drive. Those are slightly longer than previous and subsequent models, and will impact the fans on several of the CPU upgrades. If you do have a DVR-103, I recommend looking for a DVR-104 via eBay. It will still be fully compatible with OS9 and have the same performance as the DVR-103, but it'll be shorter and will work fine. DVR-104s run $20-30 on eBay; I swapped my G4's DVR-103 out for one when the drive's tray motor started wearing out.

[teflon]

yup, I got a powerlogix 7448 too (powerlogix, newertech and OWC are one big happy company, BTW). Its pretty solid, but it will need a firmware update, just like the 7457 did, because it was never used by Apple. Also, since Powerlogix gave up on their CPUD software after 10.4.9 (to enable napping and the expanded L2 cache), you might want to stick with 10.4.9, unless you dont really mind that much.

The 6200 Ive got was flashed for me by a nice guy in france, but I only did it that way and with a 6200 because it was the best and coolest thing that would fit in the cube. Personally, I find the 9800 to be the best all around card youll be able to find in terms of price, tinkering and performance, since a PC version would be cheap, you can flash it yourself and its a decent bit faster than the 4600 Ti. But it really does just depend on your budget and if you want OS9 or not...

[Frost]

Well, PowerLogix was an independent company back when they were making the 7457 upgrades, which was when I bought mine from them. But yeah, OWC has since taken them over.

[Sneaky Snake]

OS 9 gaming doesn't really that much to me, although Classic would be nice to have again after all these years. So would the 7800 GS beat the 9800 Pro, and even if it did is it a real pain to flash and is glitchy? Also, what speed of CPU should I go with? The 1.6 Ghz is significantly cheaper then everything else but I want it to be able to play Halo for sure and possibly even Star Wars Battlefront. A few other games will be in there but I think that they are all less intensive (Oni, Age of Empires II, Age of Mythology, perhaps Splinter Cell).

The G4 is the Gigabit Ethernet One. But I found out that it doesn't include any install discs, so.... Would any of you guys have a copy of Panther or Tiger disc lying around that I could have?

-Snake

EDIT: oh wait, I see the 1.6 GHz is a 7447. So I'll probably go with the 2.0 GHz as its only $45 then the 1.8

[teflon]

go with the fastest you can reasonably afford. But even the 7447 at 1.6Ghz should give you plenty of power to play all the games you just listed. I know it worked in my cube when I had a 1.3Ghz 7457 (before it killed itself playing CMR). But whatever CPU you get you will 100% be CPU limited, and worse, FSB limited, since it only runs at 100Mhz. Later machines with faster FSBs can make better use of what you put in there, but for the GE model, it will always be a slight thorn in your side.

[Frost]

The 1.42 GHz 7457 was just good enough to do Halo on my G4/733, so you'll probably want to go with the 1.8 or 2.0 GHz 7448. That way the extra speed will make up for the loss of the L3 cache. From what I've seen from benchmarks the 1.8 7448 seems roughly equivalent to the 1.42 7457, so that should be good. Until I got G5ed thanks to the hurricane I was playing Halo with a 1.42 GHz 7457 G4 and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and all was well at 800x600 max detail.

Granted now I run at 1920x1200 max detail and get more FPS than I can shake a stick at, but that's a different story.

[Sneaky Snake]

Would I need a bigger PSU in order to run the new GPU and another expansion card like a USB 2.0 card?

[teflon]

Not really.
The 7448 runs pretty low in comparison to older chips, and since youre a dual core right now, thatll definitely be less. USB 2.0 barely makes a dent either.

AS for the GPU, I just had a thought. Im not 100%, so head to that wiki I linked you to above and check, but Im not sure that a 7800GS would play too nice with the Gigabit Ethernet machine. Something to do with AGP 2x and AGP 4x mixed in with the PCIe to AGP bridge on the card and it just doesnt work in some G4 towers (my reference point is that I remember wanting a 6600GT in my Cube, but that had this problem, so I had to settle for the 6200).

Given that, you might be stuck with a 9800, in which case power consumption should be just fine.

on another subject, I had great fun taking the entire thing apart a few times to clean out all the dust and gunk on the fans (in the PSU too), and replaced them all with newer ones which made it marginally quieter (still bleeding loud compared to a V8 engine on max revs).

Also, for the USB 2 card, get something thats guaranteed to work in the mac. I bought a no name card first, and that didnt work properly after a month, so ended up getting something else. might have been from sonnet tech.

And finally, if you want wireless in there, either go for the original airport card, or make sure you research which specific wireless card revision etc. etc. will work. I got a belkin and ended up using Ralink drivers.

having said all that, if you stick with looking for things on OWC, then that should cater to all your needs and avoid the headaches I had.

[Frost]

Hmm, teflon's right there, I forgot the GEs were 2x. I thought they had moved to 4x with the GEs, but it seems I remembered wrong and it was the DAs that first got 4x.

EDIT: Yep, sure enough, I checked and the reflashers all state the 7800 GS works only with 4x or 8x slots.

EDIT 2: Barefeats has some good benchmarks on what you'd probably be looking at from cards from that particular era. http://www.barefeats.com/rad9800h.html Test machine is a 1.42 MP Windtunnel G4 so it's obviously going to run faster than you'll see on that GE PowerMac, but it gives a good idea of how the cards compare.

[Sneaky Snake]

looks like I'll go for the 9800 then. What is the stock card with the GE

So how big of a difference would there be between a 1.6 Ghz 7447A and a 1.8 Ghz 7448? I know that you strongly recommended the 7448 but the price difference is $135 between the two processors ($220 vs $355).

[Frost]

Not a whole lot for pure number crunching, but from what I understand 744x processors take a pretty noticeable hit on games due to the total lack of the L3 cache found on 745x processors. The 7448s are supposed to mitigate that pretty well by doubling the L2 cache from the 512K found on the 7447s to a full megabyte.

Realistically though, it shouldn't matter too much unless you want to squeeze the extra bit of performance out that cache-intensive apps will get. Since your concern seems to mostly revolve around gaming though, it might be worth it if you've got the cash and you want to get those extra frames. If I remember right the 2.0 GHz 7448s got as much as 6-8 extra fps out of some games versus the 2.0 GHz 7447s. A 1.6 GHz 7447 versus a 1.8 GHz 7448 would probably be more pronounced.

And the stock card is a 16 MB Rage 128 Pro. No matter what card you get it'll beat the ever-loving popsnizzle out of the card currently in that machine. I know I sure as hell noticed a difference when I swapped my G4's 32MB GeForce 2 MX for the 128MB GeForce 4 Ti4600.

[Sargiel]

I upgraded my old G4 tower extensively (2Ghz G4, SATA card & HDD, additional RAM, 9800 Pro, USB 2.0 card, wireless network card) and am in the process of sounding it out for resale after a year of disuse

I've the 2Ghz 7447 and I can confirm I had to make some adjustments to prevent overheading - the DA case isn't the best at circulating air! The 9800 Pro is a great card for a G4 and was more than sufficient for my gaming needs at the time - and Doom 3 was playable

Definitely go with the 7448 - it's faster and it'll run cooler so you'll have less potential overheating issues.

[yo-mike]

I just upgraded my Digital Audio from a G4 533 MHz to G4 800 MHz PowerLogix
The X-Bench results before my upgrade is total 23.11
and the X-Bench results after my upgrade is total 30.21

-Mike