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Upgrade Card Advice

post #1 of 4
10/2/03 at 1:21pm
Thread Starter 
Greetings Everyone,

I wanted some advice on purchasing an upgrade card.

I have the 400 MHz Sawtooth (PC100) G4 tower and was thinking of upgrading. I am debating between a single processor or a dual processor. I want this baby to last me for a while so I was thinking that dual was the way to go. However, I also don't want to dump too much more money into it.

I was thinking of the Powerlogix single processor 1.4 GHz upgrade which is about $470.

I wanted to see what their prices on the dual 1GHz cards were but it looks like they pulled that model. So, they off a dual 1.2 GHz for something like $799.

Is it worth the extra $300 to get duals processors at 1.2 Ghz? What would be pros and cons for the two cards?

I just find that under OSX, 400 MHz is just way too slow. Switching between multiple apps is a pain and things like iPhoto run way too slow. Forget about iMovie. I also like to relieve stress by playing games like Starcraft or Baldur's Gate II but they are way too slow under OSX.

What do you guys think? Oh, I also plan to spend about $80 to upgrade the video card and I have 384 MBytes of RAM (which I might upgrade as well).

Any advice would be much appreciated.

-Dr. Bimane
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post #2 of 4
10/2/03 at 1:39pm
GigaDesign 1.2 GHz card for 390 dollars is sweet.. A dual is not that much faster to begin with and with that 100 MHz bus instead of a 167 MHz bus I do not think the differenece will be that big.

Upgraded my G4/400 and it made a big difference now it feels quite similar to the dual 1.25 (apart from booting that still take forwever). The 400 was struggling even with fast typing in Word, that is gone and UT2003 is now playable
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post #3 of 4
10/2/03 at 2:07pm
Thread Starter 
Hey, thanks for the input.

You got a Gigadesign card? Why did you choose that over Powerlogix? Any specific reason?

Thanks,

-Dr. Bimane
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post #4 of 4
10/2/03 at 11:41pm
If you take a look at http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/cpureview.lasso
you will find that there is far more user complians with PL than GD. I really prefer to keep things simple so picking a product with high relieability is very important.

Having a dual is more torque at the same speed so to speak. Using few applications it really does make no difference, when you really pile things on the thing is that you can do more with maintaned speed. I am typing this from a dual 1.25 and I would rahter have had one 2.5 GHz G4, that being said a dual 1.25 is better than a single 1.25 but I would not pay more than a 50% premium for that second CPU.

Regarding the booting I plan to make a clean install of 10.3 and I am sure that this will help a lot compared to the current installation that is a a long chain of upgrades since the public beta so the OS is scattered all over the disk
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