Yay! Sonnet 1.8Ghz Duet on its way

[jongleur]

Finally tracked down a new (unused) in box with all its documentation, a Sonnet 1.8Ghz Duet CPU upgrade. Now I have to just wait for the package to arrive from merry ol' England.

This will be the last "planned" upgrade for my QS2002 work horse.

Dropped a 60GB OWC SSD into it last weekend. XBench Disk rating jumped from 52 (WD 500GB 7200rpm SATA) to 102 (OWC 60GB Mercury Extreme SATA), and although XBench disk rating has almost doubled, overall performance has only jumped from 48 to 53 (+10.5%). Still, not bad performance for the old girl.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I have an Encore MDX (also a dual 1.8GHz) in my OS 9 MDD. It did not improve CodeWarrior performance much, possibly due to the missing L3 cache and CodeWarrior is pretty diskbound anyway. However, it was noticibly faster in Virtual PC.

 

[jongleur]

I have an Encore MDX (also a dual 1.8GHz) in my OS 9 MDD. It did not improve CodeWarrior performance much, possibly due to the missing L3 cache and CodeWarrior is pretty diskbound anyway. However, it was noticibly faster in Virtual PC.

I know that the Duet only has single CPU support under MOS9, maybe the same for the Encore?

These days I'm running 10.5.8 mostly, and when I have to drop back "to the good ol' days", Classic under 10.4.11 is fine. I can boot into 9.2.2, but as it doesn't recognise the SATA card, it is a two stage boot for the return trip, first stop-over at Tiger on IDE0, then a connecting flight to Leopard on SATA1 (SSD) or SATA0 Plattersville.

 

[Tron]

>> I know that the Duet only has single CPU support under MOS9, maybe the same for the Encore?

I'm asking me the same question.

I recently instaled a Maxpower 7448 1.8Ghz dual in one of the two old Sawtoth I have arround here.

The installation instructions said the we have to remove de "Apple CPU Plugins" extension. But if we do this, the multipprocessor libraryes do not load, and the CPU sleep don't work.

The CPU sleep problem, partially is solved by "Sleeper" control panel.

But I could'nt enable de second proccesor in any way.

I try several versions of the "Apple CPU Plugins", and the moderns ones (3.2.2 and up) crash at the startup. And the old ones do no crash, but don't do anything.

Further investigations in one of my two MDD, show me that, even some old version didn't enable multiprocessor in MDD, at least enable deep CPU sleep. This let me to think that the crash in Apple CPU Plugins is related to enabling CPU sleep in 7448.

Due to the crash, this extension couldn't enable the multipprocessor librarys.

Any help will be apreciated. Thanx

Sorry for my bad English.

 

[ccmac]

Regarding your 7448 and the CPU Plugins problem. I have found this Japanese retailer that from the rough Google English translation seems to say they have a custom updated/edited CPU Plugin file that fixes the 9.2.2 crash problem with 7447 upgrades:

http://www.vintagecomp.com/sell/Sonnet/Encore7447.html

Here is a direct link to the file:

http://www.vintagecomp.com/sell/Sonnet/updatedCPU.sit

I believe it will also work with 7448 upgrades as well. I don't own a 7447 or 7448 upgrade so I have never been able to test out this file to see if does what I think the translation seems to be saying.

Try it out and report back here to tell us what it does.

 

[Tron]

Thanx.

But I already know about this, and it didn't work: crash at startup as the others do. At least in my sawtoth 7448.

 

[Unknown_K]

So without L3 cache these chips are not that fast (when they work that is)?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

The FSB being what it is, yes, they suffer somewhat without L3. Straight CPU-bound tasks work well (hence Virtual PC's notable performance improvement, as well as Cinema 4D), but mixed tasks probably starve the CPU for data. I'd still take the 1.8s over this MDD's original 1.25s any day, though. While not everything may run as fast as I think it should, nothing runs slower.

FWIW, MP Tasks seem to work fine on it, even though Sonnet says multiprocessing is not supported on 9.2.2. However, these are 7447As, so it could be something specifically about the 7448.

 

[Unknown_K]

Is the cost for a dual 1.8 (they seem pricey still) worth the upgrade if you do have a dual 1.25ghz MDD? I have seen those MDD going for $140 or $125 on LEMswap recently so you have a whole machine with 2GB of RAM for probably around what that CPU upgrade would cost alone. The only dual G4 I have is a Sawtooth with dual 500's (and it runs nicely).

I think the very last G4 tower Apple made was OS 9 bootable, from the looks of it that is where I will stop collecting.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Frankly, I'd say it's probably not worth it for most users. I bought it to see how well it sped up the heavy-duty tasks I do on my OS 9 MDD, and you saw the results: overall better, but not as much as I hoped. Mine was bought new from Sonnet for around $600, which is now more than what the MDD is worth, and now that they are out of production you can expect to pay more if you can find one at all. Unless you have a lot of cash burning holes in your pockets, for most tasks, the improvements will be noticeable but only minor to moderate.

The last bootable OS 9 G4 was the single processor G4/1.25 released in 2003 with FW400 (a quiet closeout by Apple to capitalize on remaining pent-up OS 9-compatible hardware demand). Note that this model succeeds the 2002 dual 1.25GHz FW400 (which is what I have), which is the most powerful, but was not the last.

 

[Tron]

I made several test, comparing this two machines whith exactly the same system software (9.2.2-CPU 5. 8) :

- G4 MDD 7455@1.66Ghz, 166Mhz FSB,Radeon 9000 PRO 64Mb, 1.5 Gb RAM, and

- G4 Sawtoth 7448@2.040Ghz 120Mhz FSB, Radeon 8500 64Mb, 1.5 Gb RAM.

The MDD is 10-15% faster in video playing and encoding (using 3ivx),Photoshop, SoundJam MP3 encoding and Classilla page scroll.

The Sawtoth is 10-15% faster in Adobe InDesign, Acrobat Reader and VectorWorks rendering.

In the Sawtoth only one CPU is working, while in the MDD are working the two.

If disable one CPU on the MDD, Photoshop and SoundJam perform very similary in both systems.

I don't know what make the MDD perform so well, but in general it has a better Motherboard arquitecture in addition to 2Mb of L3: 166mhz FSB, AGP 4x, DDR 333 Mhz whith good DMA.

Upping the FSB on the Sawtoth to 133Mhz don't make big differences and make and loss stability.

The MDD at 1.66 loss stability also, if ambient temperature is over 21 ºC. (I had to continue to work in his overclock)

Sorry for my bad English