[geeks] The ol' trusty G4...

[Nate]

> Nate,
>
> So all you kept were the MB, RAM, and optical drive?

RAM isn't from Apple (third party PC133, three 512MB sticks), optical  
drive is now a Pioneer DVR-111.  Motherboard is original.

> I am curious about the CPU and video card upgrades:
>
>  - was the CPU upgrade very expensive?

It is somewhat expensive... well, they don't sell a dual 1.6Ghz right  
now it looks like, but they do sell a dual 1.7Ghz for $600.  I had  
been running a PowerLogix dual G4 1.3Ghz 7455 (256k on-chip L2 cache,  
2MB L3 cache per CPU) upgrade, which was very hot but very compatible  
(no OpenFirmware patches needed to be fully recognized).  The dual  
7455 wasn't 100% stable however, and neither was it's warranty  
replacement, which ultimately ended up with being able to trade it in  
to the reseller for one of the new 7448 CPU upgrades because they  
could no longer replace it with a (now out of production) 7455 upgrade.

The 7448 is the latest G4, manufactured on 90 nanometer silicon-on- 
insulator process technology and the most on-chip L2 cache of any G4,  
and so it runs both cool and with very good performance (the Altivec  
performance is actually a good bit better per clock than it is on the  
G5).  While installing a 7447 or 7448 does involve booting off a  
special CD to patch the motherboard's firmware, and once installed  
I've found it hasn't been 100% reliable in coming out of deep sleep  
(resulting in me deciding to just no longer deep sleep my G4), those  
downsides are outweighed by the performance improvements and lower  
heat levels of the upgrade.

>  - What sort of benefit are you seeing from the upgraded video card  
> compared to the cost of the upgrade?

The benefit is speed, and depending on what you do, it can be very  
noticable.

Finding the right video card to flash is the tricky bit - you have to  
find a video card that most closely matches the kind that Apple used,  
and a lot of PC video card makers have tended to make changes as time  
has gone on from the reference designs in order to reduce costs (the  
card makers can just tweak the video firmware to adjust for their  
design changes, which makes flashing some cards with the Apple  
firmware a no-go).  Apple also had a tendency to spec out video cards  
that had external TDMS transmitters (rather than use the on-GPU ones,  
which are both lower quality and in some cases didn't support dual- 
link DVI when Apple needed it for their 30" display).

Right now you can't get an AGP 6800GT new, so you'd probably have to  
go to Ebay to find one.  A card that's a bit faster and available is  
the 7800GS, and as far as the intricacies of finding the right one  
go, I'd refer you to the new wiki/home of the Strange Dogs forum  
members (one of the more accomplished FCode modifying groups out  
there) - http://themacelite.wikidot.com/

Check out the "Buying Guides" section, what it says there is  
important.  As far as cost, you might be able to find a new 7800GS  
that you can flash for as little as $115 after rebate right now.

I've successfully flashed an ATI 7000, 8500, and 9800 card with  
original (unmodified) Apple firmware, and flashed modified firmware  
to an NVIDIA Ti4600 and the 6800GT I'm currently using.  The 8500 and  
up all support Quartz Extreme in OS X (which uses OpenGL and AGP  
texturing to map window bitmaps as textures in video memory to  
offload a lot of the GUI to the GPU).  The last card to also support  
hardware acceleration in OS 9 was the Ti4600, so if legacy support is  
important to you as well, stop there.  The FCode in the full (non- 
reduced, 128k) firmware 9800 does support monitor resolution changing  
in OS 9, but no acceleration in OS 9.  The 6800GT and reduced 64k  
firmware 9800 don't support changing resolutions in OS 9 and are also  
unaccelerated there.  The 9800 and 6800GT support Core Image in OS X,  
with the 6800GT and above performing better:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/

While Core Image has a CPU fallback mode, applications that take  
advantage of Core Image (such as Quartz Composer, Apple's Motion, or  
Aperture) can only be used in a practical, productive sense by  
running them on a system with a good GPU.

> I've gotten a bootab;e SATA card for my DA 466 MHz G4 (but not yet  
> upgraded) - did it make a big difference (from IDE -> SATA) for  
> user experience?

Subjectively and objectively, it does make a difference.  Using a  
SATA card also gets around that annoying 48-bit LBA issue with PATA,  
so you're no longer capped at 128GB volume sizes.  Here are some  
benchmarks with the Raptor, mostly full, so this is mostly inner  
(slower) tracks:

Sequential
Uncached Write 72.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 72.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read  25.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read  68.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
Uncached Write  1.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 46.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read   0.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read  31.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]

- Nate