I retired my PowerMac 8500/180 last year and picked up a Sawtooth 350Mhz. I put a Radeon Mac Edition in it and some more RAM and it ran quite well. (You can find Radeon 8500's now for what I paid for the Radeon Mac Edition then.)
Earlier this year I got a good deal on a new 1Ghz Sonnet processor upgrade off of eBay and I upgraded to Panther. Couldn't be happier with the price/performance I have.
I also agree with satchmo in that if it is a stock 400, you could negotiate down a little too...
get a radeon agp and a 512MB stick of PC100 Ram and that thing will run Panther just fine. I know cuz i own it :-)
That's exactly what I wanted to hear.
Did anyone see the Radeon 9000 with 128MB VRAM available at Other World Computing (a Mac upgrade distributor)? I think that would compliment the Sawtooth quite nicely.
That's a great price for a very upgradable machine. It'll hold up to 2 GB of RAM, and hard drive upgrades are relatively easy, as well. A video card with at least 32 mb of RAM is a must, but I'd go a step further, and upgrade the CPU as well. i put a 1.2 Giga Designs card in my Sawtooth 450, and it's been just awesome.
This looks to be about the best deal going, right now.
Hey chris_v that's along the lines of what I wanted to do as well. Sticks of PC100 SDRAM are cheap as heck and you can even get Serial-ATA drives into the Sawtooths now.
Imagine an old Sawtooth with a Radeon 9000, two 160GB S-ATA drives, a 1-1.2Ghz G4, and a 8x Superdrive.
I know you could probably buy a more recent computer for the prices of the upgrades, but I like building FrankenMacs and giving an older machine a new lease on life.
Comments
But he's got to resell that for some profit, so $400 is not out of line...perhaps you can negotiate to shave off another $50-$100
I retired my PowerMac 8500/180 last year and picked up a Sawtooth 350Mhz. I put a Radeon Mac Edition in it and some more RAM and it ran quite well. (You can find Radeon 8500's now for what I paid for the Radeon Mac Edition then.)
Earlier this year I got a good deal on a new 1Ghz Sonnet processor upgrade off of eBay and I upgraded to Panther. Couldn't be happier with the price/performance I have.
I also agree with satchmo in that if it is a stock 400, you could negotiate down a little too...
Originally posted by applenut
get a radeon agp and a 512MB stick of PC100 Ram and that thing will run Panther just fine. I know cuz i own it :-)
That's exactly what I wanted to hear.
Did anyone see the Radeon 9000 with 128MB VRAM available at Other World Computing (a Mac upgrade distributor)? I think that would compliment the Sawtooth quite nicely.
This looks to be about the best deal going, right now.
CV
Imagine an old Sawtooth with a Radeon 9000, two 160GB S-ATA drives, a 1-1.2Ghz G4, and a 8x Superdrive.
I know you could probably buy a more recent computer for the prices of the upgrades, but I like building FrankenMacs and giving an older machine a new lease on life.