Resolved CPU Upgrades - The PowerMac G4 Digital Audio (DA)

[MicroTecture]

Hello!

Currently, I have not seen someone confirm a Gigabit Ethernet CPU working in a Digital Audio. I have seen Gigabit Ethernet G4 CPU's around on eBay and some are even dual CPUs. This one I'm looking at here being at dual 800Mhz.

eBay Link

This reportedly being compatible with the PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet.
I've looked around and I've seen Quicksilver CPUs in a Digital Audio PowerMac before but no mention of the Gigabit Ethernet model.
The current CPU in my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio is the 466Mhz single G4 CPU.

I have not seen anyone confirm compatibility of using a Gigabit Ethernet CPU in a Digital Audio PowerMac G4 yet.

The questions I have here:

Is this CPU compatible with my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio?
Will this greatly help my performance?

Thank you all. I hope you all have a great day!

 

[ervus]

Yes; it can work in a DA. Maybe; performance would depend on what your current CPU is and what software you want to run.

There are threads around here and over at 68kmla on swapping CPUs from different towers. For a dual 800 in a DA, you basically need to power it and cool it. So it is not a simple drop-in upgrade, but it can work with a little effort.

 

[MicroTecture]

Yes; it can work in a DA. Maybe; performance would depend on what your current CPU is and what software you want to run.

There are threads around here and over at 68kmla on swapping CPUs from different towers. For a dual 800 in a DA, you basically need to power it and cool it. So it is not a simple drop-in upgrade, but it can work with a little effort.

Oh cool! Thanks!

What do you think of soldering on newer CPUs like a 7448 onto a DP CPU board? I'm not an expert at soldering by any means and I've never soldered anything in my life but a 7448 2GHZ upgrade might be interesting to see for a G4. I wonder what kind of work would be required on that.

 

[ervus]

It is possible to swap out chips and it has been done, but finding affordable 7448s is difficult. There are some chip-swapped CPU boards for sale over on 68kmla. Otherwise, ebay is maybe the best place to look for G4 CPU upgrades.

 

[MicroTecture]

It is possible to swap out chips and it has been done, but finding affordable 7448s is difficult. There are some chip-swapped CPU boards for sale over on 68kmla. Otherwise, ebay is maybe the best place to look for G4 CPU upgrades.

I’d sure like to see where on 68kmla I can find these for sale then. I wonder how much they are. I’ve browsed through there before but I haven’t quite found anyone who sells them at the moment unless I’ve simply missed them.

Have you seen any of them recently?

 

[ervus]

Unlike this forum, there is a 'trading post' classified section accessible if you log in.

 

[ChrisCharman]

Oh cool! Thanks!

What do you think of soldering on newer CPUs like a 7448 onto a DP CPU board? I'm not an expert at soldering by any means and I've never soldered anything in my life but a 7448 2GHZ upgrade might be interesting to see for a G4. I wonder what kind of work would be required on that.

Check out @dosdude1 on YouTube before you attempt to solder anything, as it's not that simple and you would need to change more than just the BGA chip, like voltages etc. You would need the right equipment as well.

 

[ChrisCharman]

I’d sure like to see where on 68kmla I can find these for sale then. I wonder how much they are. I’ve browsed through there before but I haven’t quite found anyone who sells them at the moment unless I’ve simply missed them.

Have you seen any of them recently?

Both of my CPU upgrades were from eBay, but they are increasingly hard to find these days and when they do pop-up they come with a hefty price-tag. The 7447/7448, or anything Sonnet are the most sought after.

Some Quicksilver Daughterboards can be made to work with slight modification on the DA, much more easily achievable than soldering on a new chip if you're looking for a project.

 

[eyoungren]

Both of my CPU upgrades were from eBay, but they are increasingly hard to find these days and when they do pop-up they come with a hefty price-tag. The 7447/7448, or anything Sonnet are the most sought after.

Some Quicksilver Daughterboards can be made to work with slight modification on the DA, much more easily achievable than soldering on a new chip if you're looking for a project.

The Newertech 2Ghz SP is a 7448. Basically, the Holy Grail of CPU upgrades. I know of only ONE person who has one and it fell in to his lap on these forums. Outside of that I've never seen one on eBay, ever.

 

[r34per]

The Newertech 2Ghz SP is a 7448. Basically, the Holy Grail of CPU upgrades. I know of only ONE person who has one and it fell in to his lap on these forums. Outside of that I've never seen one on eBay, ever.

I bought a sawtooth g4 for 50$ a few months ago off marketplace that had a newertech maxpower g4. It wasn't until after i got i realized just what i actually had! It is the single 1.8ghz one, and that whole computer was pretty decked out actually. It had a pci sata controller in it, a usb and firewire card, a radeon 9000, and 1gb of ram that i later bumped up to 2. Weirdly it was missing the case fan, but that was a pretty cheap fix. I replaced the 9000 with a geforce 6200 and am running sorbet leopard on it. Runs pretty good!

 

[eyoungren]

I bought a sawtooth g4 for 50$ a few months ago off marketplace that had a newertech maxpower g4. It wasn't until after i got i realized just what i actually had! It is the single 1.8ghz one, and z970mp's sorbet leopard runs great on it

Lucky!

Sonnet is great. I have the 1.8Ghz Duet (Dual Processor), but they pretty much used 7447s. NewerTech went with 7448s and there's a performance difference. Finding good Sonnets is hard now, finding NewerTech is almost impossible.

 

[MicroTecture]

Both of my CPU upgrades were from eBay, but they are increasingly hard to find these days and when they do pop-up they come with a hefty price-tag. The 7447/7448, or anything Sonnet are the most sought after.

Some Quicksilver Daughterboards can be made to work with slight modification on the DA, much more easily achievable than soldering on a new chip if you're looking for a project.

I've seen some Gigabit Ethernet/Quick Silver CPU upgrades around at 68kmla under that section mentioned earlier. My chances of getting a 7448 is right there I think. What will the price be? No idea.

Assuming I got such CPU upgrade, I'd need to treat it as if I'm dealing with a QS (Quick Silver) CPU probably so the machine actually powers on. Currently I think at the moment I might just get the GB (Gigabit Ethernet) CPU for the DA (Digital Audio).

I've seen somewhere around having to put some clip with 12v (something like this) somewhere on the CPU (I'll have to look back to make sure) but that individual was doing it with a QS CPU on a DA. I think I'd have to treat it the same way for a GB CPU in the DA.

 

[r34per]

I've seen some Gigabit Ethernet/Quick Silver CPU upgrades around at 68kmla under that section mentioned earlier. My chances of getting a 7448 is right there I think. What will the price be? No idea.

Assuming I got such CPU upgrade, I'd need to treat it as if I'm dealing with a QS (Quick Silver) CPU probably so the machine actually powers on. Currently I think at the moment I might just get the GB (Gigabit Ethernet) CPU for the DA (Digital Audio).

I've seen somewhere around having to put some clip with 12v (something like this) somewhere on the CPU (I'll have to look back to make sure) but that individual was doing it with a QS CPU on a DA. I think I'd have to treat it the same way for a GB CPU in the DA.

Yea, i think one of the screw pads can be used for a 12v source. One other problem is that the the ide port is in the way on the DA when using a QS dual cpu card with it. Some people have removed it to make room, but not sure if you absolutely need to or not.

 

[ervus]

I think there is some confusion here about CPUs and the tower models that they came in. The dual 800MHz CPU in your first post is from a quicksilver, not a gigE. There are sites where these series of apple G4 towers are described and compared, but the main difference for the purpose of this discussion is the bus speed (100 vs 133MHz), and the position of the CPU and socket on the logic board. To a large extent these series of CPUs are all interchangeable. The main exception is the dual 450/500MHz from a gigE, which will not physically fit the DA or quicksilver.

 

[MicroTecture]

I think there is some confusion here about CPUs and the tower models that they came in. The dual 800MHz CPU in your first post is from a quicksilver, not a gigE. There are sites where these series of apple G4 towers are described and compared, but the main difference for the purpose of this discussion is the bus speed (100 vs 133MHz), and the position of the CPU and socket on the logic board. To a large extent these series of CPUs are all interchangeable. The main exception is the dual 450/500MHz from a gigE, which will not physically fit the DA or quicksilver.

Odd how the listing mentions a gigE. Well, I guess this would be an option I can look at for the time being (dual 800MHZ CPU mentioned in my first post).

 

[ervus]

So to try and clear things up a bit I stole some pictures from ebay and made a little ID guide. This is not comprehensive, but it covers the basics:

AGP Graphics:
100MHz bus, 4 RAM slots, internal firewire port, some of these early ones do not support dual CPUs

Gigabit Ethernet:
100MHz bus, 4 RAM slots, has the gigabit chip populated, has 28v added for ADC monitors

Digital Audio:
133MHz bus, 3 RAM slots, CPU is rotated 90˚ vs earlier models

Quicksilver:
133MHz bus, 3 RAM slots, extra 12v power to logic board and "4th hole" to route this power to the CPU

 

[MicroTecture]

So to try and clear things up a bit I stole some pictures from ebay and made a little ID guide. This is not comprehensive, but it covers the basics:


View attachment 1906569

AGP Graphics:
100MHz bus, 4 RAM slots, internal firewire port, some of these early ones do not support dual CPUs

Gigabit Ethernet:
100MHz bus, 4 RAM slots, has the gigabit chip populated, has 28v added for ADC monitors

Digital Audio:
133MHz bus, 3 RAM slots, CPU is rotated 90˚ vs earlier models

Quicksilver:
133MHz bus, 3 RAM slots, extra 12v power to logic board and "4th hole" to route this power to the CPU

With this, I should find CPUs based on which machine it came out of and basically which appear would fit correctly is what I'm seeing. Thanks for the ID guide by the way!

Would you recommend the “gigE” (you said it was a QS CPU and after checking around, you are right) CPU I mentioned on the first post to get me started with a dual CPU G4 on the DA? I would imagine the existing heatsink would need to be swapped for something else for better cooling, correct?

 

[ervus]

There are already various places online that describe the differences in specifications between these similar computer models. For example:

Power Mac G4 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Quicksilver Power Mac G4 | Low End Mac

As I mentioned above, the CPUs for these models are mostly interchangeable if you're willing to make some simple modifications. If you in fact have a DA, then the way to get dual CPUs using Apple OEM boards is to use either the dual 533MHz CPU out of a DA, or the dual 800/1000 out of a Quicksilver. The dual 450/500 out of a gigE will not fit.

For this series of computers there are maybe a dozen different heatsinks that were used. Some of them can be swapped around to some extent but the easiest solution is to get the heatsink that originally came with the CPU.

The dual 800 and dual 1000 CPUs use a lot of power and I would suggest using one of the OEM heatsinks with at least one good fan. If you make a custom heatsink then there are probably hundreds of options.

Of course there were also a number of different aftermarket CPUs from Sonnet, Powerlogix, NewerTech, OWC, FastMac, etc.

 

[Adarna]

Has anyone considered comparing the cost of maintaining a PowerPC today rather than migrating to a M1 Mac? It has been over 15 years since the last one was released by Apple.

Perhaps its time to upgrade? A lot of the production bottlenecks that since became part of your workflow may have been R&D out of 2021 Macs.

 

[MysticCow]

Has anyone considered competing the cost of maintaning a PowerPC today rather than migrating to a M1 Mac? It has been over 15 years since the last one was released by Apple.

Perhaps its time to upgrade? A lot of the production bottlenecks that since became part of your workflow may have been R&D out of 2021 Macs.

I always call this the Mac mini rule. Any upgrade has to be measured against the price of a shiny new Mac mini ($899 USD for the 16 GB model).

 

[Adarna]

I always call this the Mac mini rule. Any upgrade has to be measured against the price of a shiny new Mac mini ($899 USD for the 16 GB model).

Not here to disrupt the thread but provide an alert that maybe after more than 15 years it may be time to modernize even when you have to spend extra on the latest version or equivalent to the software you are using today.

The larger the number of "nm" the less power efficient the device becomes.

Is the memory basis originating from the last PowerMac G5 (90 nm) that maxed out on 16GB?

I think that should not follow as Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) is more efficient & quicker with memory allocation so 8GB LPDDR4X 4,266Mhz faster memory has a higher utilization in 2021 relative to pre-2006 16GB DDR2 533MHz or slower memory.

This would lower the Mac mini price to $699 for the 8GB model. If you have a student in your family you can get it at $649. 3rd party dealers have priced it to a historic low of $499.

Not to mention the integrated graphics of the M1 is equivalent to a discreet graphics released in 2016.

Pls take into account the 39W max power consumption of the top-end M1 Mac mini as the power consumption & BTU difference of the PowerPC Macs may be 5-10x more than M1? This would add up over time in terms of $/kWh utility bills and environmental impact.

If I was using any PowerPC Mac from 1999-2005 I'd have opted to upgrade to any 2009 Mac so I can benefit from macOS Snow Leopard when it dropped PowerPC support.

After 10 years of service I am transitioning from a 2011 & 2012 (32 nm & 22 nm respectively) Mac to a 2021 & 2021 Mac (5 nm). My next replacement would be in 2031 & 2032 (sub-1 nm).

My replacement is relatively long in relation to the typical upgrade cycle of consumers as macOS gives up to 10 years Security Update.

 

[MicroTecture]

I'm using a MacBook Pro Mid 2012 (i5 model) that's pretty much fully maxed out (16GB RAM, removed optical drive for an SSD paired with another SSD on the primary SATA slot, WiFi/BT upgraded, etc etc...) as my main laptop. I should likely replace the battery but its performance I think is tolerable at the time being.

I have way more modern computers around at the moment that could outperform a PowerPC G4 CPU any day of the week. One of my machines has a fast Ryzen and RTX GPU in it.

I'm considering upgrading this MacBook Pro to something more modern sometime in the future I think.

Not all people who have a PowerPC Mac will use it as their daily and not all people who have a PowerPC Mac will not use it as their daily

Now in some circumstances can a PowerPC Mac suit the needs of someone who needs a daily driver. It depends on the person and what they need/want their computer to do.

Some people who use PowerPC Macs simply love tinkering around with them, running old software, etc etc...
I know for certain that there's some people who use PowerPC Macs as daily machines for a variety of reasons.
Some people who upgrade their PowerPC Macs to the max don't do it because they want to use it as their daily driver. We do things for our own reasons.

I don't use a PowerPC Mac as a daily machine. I love tinkering around and just having fun with PowerPC machines.
Sometimes people even have a PowerPC Mac as their backup, as a server, machine for older software, or for some other use case. I've seen a video somewhere of a PowerMac G5 being used as some kind of Linux server?

Now let's be real here: Do you expect a PowerMac G3 to render a sophisticated 8K ray-traced video at a super high frame rate and be able to play it back without any issues?

I don't think I got my PowerMac G4 with the idea of using it as a daily driver realistically speaking here. I'm using my MacBook Pro to type this out right here at the moment.

I find the new M1 Macs interesting, I might even get one sometime. I wonder what an M1-based Mac Pro would look like.

 

[ervus]

The question is not about the technology, it's about how it gets used, who owns it, and who controls it. Please do not derail this thread or start arguments in this sub-forum...

 

[MicroTecture]

The question is not about the technology, it's about how it gets used, who owns it, and who controls it. Please do not derail this thread or start arguments in this sub-forum...

View attachment 1907076

Man, that's exactly what I wanted to say basically except shorter and I think that would've made more sense too than what I wrote. I think I'll mark this thing as 'resolved' since I got my original question answered.

 

[ChrisCharman]

The Newertech 2Ghz SP is a 7448. Basically, the Holy Grail of CPU upgrades. I know of only ONE person who has one and it fell in to his lap on these forums. Outside of that I've never seen one on eBay, ever.

Yeah i’ve been on the lookout for both the 7448 2Ghz and dual 1.8Ghz for many years. I’d of course grab any of the 7447A versions as well if they popped-up. The 1.4Ghz single Giga was my daily driver as a student, i was running that stable at 1.67 Ghz for 5 years or so (Never could get 1.7Ghz stable). Recently replaced it with another GigaDesigns but a dual 1.33Ghz this time. I haven’t attempted to overclock that one yet. I’ve had no issues with my Giga upgrades so I wouldn’t hesitate to grab their 2Ghz processor as another option.