PowerMac 8600/9600 Speed?
Hi all,
My primary computer is a PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth) and I have a secondary computer which is a PowerMac 5260/120. I am looking to replace the 5260 with something that has quite a bit more power. If I were to buy a 8600 or 9600 how much faster would this computer perform? (in comparison to the 5260)
If I were to install a Sonnet Tech G4/450 w/ 1MB L2 cache card and an ATI Raedon 7000/32MB could I expect "real G4 performace" or something resembling it?
Thanks a lot!
My primary computer is a PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth) and I have a secondary computer which is a PowerMac 5260/120. I am looking to replace the 5260 with something that has quite a bit more power. If I were to buy a 8600 or 9600 how much faster would this computer perform? (in comparison to the 5260)
If I were to install a Sonnet Tech G4/450 w/ 1MB L2 cache card and an ATI Raedon 7000/32MB could I expect "real G4 performace" or something resembling it?
Thanks a lot!
Comments
Anyway, I'm not an expert on older hardware and CPU upgrades, but I can try to make some educated guesses here. The 8600 (I used to have one - t'was a good Mac) has a bus of only 50 MHz. While a CPU upgrade can help some in crunching raw numbers, the bus is still going to be a key bottleneck. The same applies with the video card; it's not going to perform nearly at its peak in an older system. Of course, pure speculation...
<a href="http://www.xlr8yourmac.com" target="_blank">accelerate your mac</a> has oodles of information about every kind of Mac hardware upgrades along with a rather large database of user reviews. Here is the CPU upgrades' <a href="http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/cpureview.lasso" target="_blank">review search page</a>. I did a quick search and found that several users have had pleasant experiences and good performance with Sonnet G4s in the 8600s and 9600s.
[ 11-11-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
Will it be usable? Yes, moreso in OS 9. Hacking to get PCI Quartz Extreme may help a bit in X.
I speak from using a Beige G3/266 -> G3/466 -> G4/583 with Radeon 7000 in X and 9, which outclasses an 8/9600.