Dual G4 Sawtooth @ 450. Bump to 500Mhz? Would it matter?

[coius]

I have a dual 450Mhz Sawtooth with a Uni-North Rev. 7 and 1GB RAM.

I am wondering that if I bumped it to 500Mhz or 550, would it matter? Would I see a performance increase?

I want to get all I can out of it, but I am not sure if it would be wise to do it...

I know there are places that tell you how to do this, but has anyone done this with a G4 of this age, and one: have you done it on a Dually, and two: was it stable and was there an increase in performance?

 

[Byrd]

If you're comfortable with the soldering, 50Mhz x 2 will help. It's likely that's all you'll get - most early G4 CPUs you could only get another 50Mhz before it crapped out.

JB

 

[coius]

Woohoo! she is now cruising at a beautiful 500Mhz!!!

And it's damn stable too! I have been running a few CPU heavy tasks at once over the last 20 minutes and it's with nary a hiccup. So I can say it has truly been a success

500Mhz Dual CPU PowerMac G4 AGP Sawtooth

 

[Christopher]

Woohoo! she is now cruising at a beautiful 500Mhz!!!
And it's damn stable too! I have been running a few CPU heavy tasks at once over the last 20 minutes and it's with nary a hiccup. So I can say it has truly been a success

500Mhz Dual CPU PowerMac G4 AGP Sawtooth

It would be cool to get it to 600MHz just because its a strange number to be dual at.

 

[coius]

haha, nah. This is the most it will go to. As much as I would like to take it further, I understand that the limitation with most of the early G4 CPUs is a 50Mhz speed bump. I don't want to kill the CPU and experiment with it too much making it irreversible.

Anyways, it seems a bit quicker, and flash animations play just a bit smoother

I am going to pop another HDD into it and mess with Linux PowerPC on it.

Anyone know of a current PowerPC Linux Distro? or has Linus given the platform the "Kiss of death" by killing the Power Kernel?

 

[ealex79]

http://software.opensuse.org/

Look for OpenSuSE 11 for PowerPC.

[8D]

 

[coius]

I seem to be having a hell of a time installing Linux on this. Ubuntu/Gentoo/YellowDogLinux/Whatever won't boot, and OpenSUSE boots, but won't install (Exits out of the installer and crashes to the prompt) which is making it awfully annoying. I think I remember reading about these machines being particularly picky about the OS's on them.

I am just going to keep trying. But it's bugging the hell out of me that I can't even get linux booted on this!

 

[Christopher]

I had Dapper Drake on my iBook for a while, gave up on it because I could not get used to it.

 

[Bunsen]

I know Ubuntu won't boot from the CD on Old World ROM machines. You need to install a bootloader and OS 9

 

[QuadSix50]

I know Ubuntu won't boot from the CD on Old World ROM machines. You need to install a bootloader and OS 9

That's with any GNU/Linux distribution on PowerPC. And of course, that's assuming that support for older PPC processors is included in the kernel of the installation disc. So far, it seems that they are but I haven't checked recently as I don't have an Old World PPC Mac anymore.

 

[ealex79]

:-x

We are talking about a Sawtooth G4? That is NewWorld.. I have OpenSuSE 10.1 installed on mine. Works like a charm.. all internal hardware I have is supported.

 

[coius]

I kept getting errors with OpenSUSE. Once it came to the part where it would format the drive, it dumped right into the Shell. I said "Screw it!" and went back to 10.4 on the machine. At least it's easy to work with

I wanted to try linux, but I am NOT going to jump through hoops just to get it to even start. My friend's iBook G4 1.2GHz will boot from the discs, and even switching out the DVD-ROM for a CD-RW or DVD-+RW, it won't boot from the discs. I have no idea why, but I am not going to mess with it for a while. When I tried to get it to boot from OS X, i couldn't get it to recognize the SATA drive in it to boot from it (I have a Sonnet PCI->SATA Adapter Card) and I ended up letting it sit till tonight where I finally gave it a good overhaul and can say it is happily up and running.

I wasn't expecting to have to do a crap load of stuff just to coax it into booting, so I am going to stop with Linux for now. Besides, schoolwork is calling and I need to get onto that

 

[ealex79]

Linux is really picky when it comes to overclocking, and for bad RAM, too. If I overclock my PC gcc will die often and often while compiling anything.

And a few computer back I had bad memory that caused exactly what you see now. On that same computer Windows seemed to run normally (although it had errors too, less obvious errors though).

 

[register]

You could try Yellow Dog Linux. Terrasoft is a company that still provides PPC workstations. They give simple installation instructions of a few pages you should read carefully, twice I recommend. Afterwards you may easily use the installer with convenient graphical installer. This runs well on a PowerBook G4. The Yellow Dog distribution is intended for office use, it does not come with a media player suite and it seems to be not easy to get one running for free.