G4 Sawtooth

[jruschme]

I'm not sure this totally qualifies as a conquest, but I'm happy...

I went to the Trenton Computer Festival on Saturday and got a couple of nice items for cheap.

The first is a Sawtooth G4- 400mhz, no drives or memory but complete otherwise; decent cosmetically for $15. I'd been wanting to get some kind of AGP G4 for a while, but most seemed to cost more for shipping than I wanted to bother with.

To complement the AGP G4, I found a PC AGP Radeon 7000 (probably an OEM card, 32mb, VGA only) for $3. This morning I finished flashing it for the Mac.

I moved over the memory and drives from my B&W G4, so now I have a QE-capable G4 with 896mb RAM running Tiger.

As a result of this, I'll be probably be putting up a posting in the Trading Post in a couple of days for some items that have fallen out of the recent updates. In the mean time, if anybody has an interest in a G3/500 ZIF, AGP Rage 128 Pro, or Beige G3 DT (400mhz), drop me a PM and we'll talk.

 

[Bunsen]

Seems like a conquest to me, and a decently priced one too.

 

[Temetka]

Very nice.

I have a PC Radeon I would love to flash.

Care to share how it's done?

 

[Unknown_K]

http://www.darkness.uklinux.net/

Shows the PCI version but AGP should be about the same.

Prices for AGP towers should be getting to the dirt cheap stage soon, will have to grab one and make it my main OS 9.2.2 machine.

 

[jruschme]

http://www.darkness.uklinux.net/
Shows the PCI version but AGP should be about the same.

That's exactly the instructions I used. Basically, the idea is to use a PC and a modified version of the PC flasher to flash a fake Mac ROM to the card. Then, you install the card in a Mac and use the ATI flash updater to install the correct ROM.

Needless to say, you need access to a PC and another PCI Mac video card. Also, although the ATI flasher for Mac should run under OS X, you'll have a lot less issues if you boot under 9.x. (In my case, it seemed like X would not boot to the desktop while the card with the fake ROM was installed, but had no problems booting 9.2.2.)

Prices for AGP towers should be getting to the dirt cheap stage soon, will have to grab one and make it my main OS 9.2.2 machine.

Personally, I'd say that the prices for the early ones are already there. Back in December, I almost picked up a similar box for $10, but would have had to get it home from the in-laws house in CA. I held off as long as I did only because I didn't want to pay shipping.

John

 

[Unknown_K]

Like anything else it depends on your location. I have seen PCI G4-400's for sale for $30 but people want more for the AGP models (no idea what they sell for). I want a 733 or better so I will have to wait a bit more. In a few years the G4 towers will be flooding recycler like p3 era gateway and dells are now.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I got my "body double" AGP G4/450 for $30. I think prices are already dropping like rocks on lowend G4s.

 

[Temetka]

I got this sawtooth for free. One of my oldest clients have been using macs for years. He has quite a few in storage and I asked him for one and he said I could help myself. So I did.

 

[geeko]

i work as the mac repair person at the local recyclers. they have tons of pci g4, agp g4s, and imac g3s.

 

[jruschme]

One favor... It turns out I have the Rev 3 Uni-N in my Sawtooth, so no dual processors. If somebody comes across a spare/cheap Sawtooth motherboard with a Rev 7, let me know please.

Thanks...

John

 

[jruschme]

Like anything else it depends on your location. I have seen PCI G4-400's for sale for $30 but people want more for the AGP models (no idea what they sell for). I want a 733 or better so I will have to wait a bit more. In a few years the G4 towers will be flooding recycler like p3 era gateway and dells are now.

Personally, though, I worry about two things...

1) Between the economy and the overall performance levels, I wonder if we aren't going to see a slowdown of the recycling of post-2001 era hardware. I know my company and my customers seem to have no issues with running PCs that are more than five years old.

2) Between the TiBook mechanical issues, iBook G3 video issues, a similar iBook G4 issue, MDD power supply failures, G5 iMac capacitor issues and G5 watercooling failures, I wonder how many older Macs will make it to the recyclers (and to people like us) in any sort of usable condition?

John

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I suppose in 10 years, we'll be bemoaning all the caps blowing on Power Macs.

 

[Unknown_K]

My opinion is newer machines will be recycled faster then the older ones are, and quite a few will have hardware problems when they do get recycled. 99% of all the old hardware I grab from the recycler is in working condition. Did anyone here ever find an old Nubus card that didn't work?

I did pass on a G4 AGP model at the recycler (he sold a stack of 1st model working stripped units for $15 each) because it was dead, and the case was kind of banged up. You do see imacs from time to time there but I do not want one. Unfortunatly he never gets compacts in, or 68K machines in general. I also seen a dozen or so B&W G3's scrapped because nobody wanted them, I have 2 and that is enough for me.

 

[jruschme]

So, I've gone ahead and installed Leopard to the second drive... it actually seems to run pretty nicely, especially after turning off the glass dock and some of the finder visual effects. That said, though, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm really missing with Leopard over Tiger is ongoing security updates.

Anybody have any Tiger vs. Leopard thoughts?

John

 

[Temetka]

In Tiger I could open a window full of MP3's select one and hit the little play bar underneath it to listen. In Leopard you cannot do this as it uses preview and the minute you move away from that window to another window and the song stops playing. I'd use iTunes, but it eats CPU power and with only 450MHz G4 at my disposal I need every spare CPU cycle.

However in Leopard is absolutely love being able to open a folder of images, hit the spacebar and view them.

That being said both Tiger and Leopard have the feature of being able to do a slideshow of a folder full of images. I still prefer the quick look method however. Simply because quick look works with almost any file type and can be extended with plugins. Now if I could have quick look but disable it specifically for MP3's so I could use the Tiger method of having Quicktime play the file for me, then I could have the best of both worlds.

Since my G4 is not my main machine, security updates don't matter to me as much as they used to simply because I practice safe computing, have nothing of consequence on that machine and can't really get all hot and bothered about the possibility of a rootkit or keylogger being installed on the machine. At most they might get my password for a few forums. Nothing terribly important.

Back on track though, I love my Sawtooth. Everything from the case design to running OS X on what I consider to be an exotic non-x86 CPU. Mine came with the built in Zip 100 drive which I actually do use on occasion which saves me from installing a PCI SCSI controller and busting out the external SCSI Zip 100 drive. That and the machine runs darn near dead quiet. I can barely tell when it is on. At some time in the future I might slap in a faster G4 for it but I am limited to single core G4's as my motherboard does not support dual core processors. Again however since this is not my main machine, any upgrade from the 450MHz G4 I have in there now will be more than acceptable. Couple that with a faster Radeon and the 1.5GB of RAM I have installed and it should be pretty snappy machine for me.

Oh and I can still boot into OS 9 should the need for a spatial finder, platinum, and retro-ness hit me.

 

[waynestewart]

In Tiger I could open a window full of MP3's select one and hit the little play bar underneath it to listen. In Leopard you cannot do this as it uses preview and the minute you move away from that window to another window and the song stops playing.

Open a new finder window and leave the one with the MP3 playing in the back. As long as you leave the window with the MP3 open then it should keep playing

Wayne