G4 Sawtooth with Dual G4-500 upgrade problem

[Unknown_K]

I have a G4-400 Sawtooth that I upgraded to dual G4-500's. On a 20GB HD I have OS 9.2.2 installed and it works fine (systems seems both G4's at the correct speed). My problem comes when I try to install any version of OSX on the 80GB HD. I tried 10.3 and 10.4 and both boot and then go to the please reboot the system screen error. I have tried using different RAM and swapped the DVD drive with a pionere DVD-R drive to make sure it was not a media problem. Any ideas?

 

[Byrd]

Is your motherboard UNI-N compatible (ie. compatible with a dual G4?)

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G4ZONE/G4_dual_processor_swap/Dual_G4_page1.html

JB

 

[Unknown_K]

Well I guess I didn't check that before, and it is a uni-n 3 model

So will a GiGE motherboard fit and work in a G4 sawtooth case?

 

[beachycove]

It's a shame because I am still marveling at how much better my Cube is than stock with a dual G4 500 upgrade. Dual G4s are the way to go in OSX if you can.

 

[Unknown_K]

Its not like I need a dual G4 Sawtooth, I do have a 1.25Ghz Quicksilver, but it would have been fun to play with on the cheap. A single G4-400 just doesn't sound like as much fun.

 

[MacJunky]

Physically GBE and Sawtooth boards are(from any of my side-by side observations) pretty much identical in shape and size. they do use a slightly different PSU pinout though (IIRC GBE is the same as DA PSU and QS is different than DA)

Some of the other things of the board are slightly different like the gigabit ethernet on one and the internal firewire on the sawtooth, but they both have pads for eachother's stuff.

 

[Unknown_K]

Not a good swap then. I installed the original g4-400 into the sawtooth and OSX installed without a problem.

 

[jruschme]

K,

What's the motherboard version on your Sawtooth? 820-1093-A (v1) or 820-1094-A (v2)?

John

 

[MacJunky]

Not a good swap then. I installed the original g4-400 into the sawtooth and OSX installed without a problem.

Well, if you have a GBE board and PSU or setup an ATX PSU or just mess around with the pins on your Sawtooth PSU It is not that bad of a swap because you gain gigabit ethernet and you also gain the ability to use dual CPUs if your Sawtooth board was old. The cases *should* be essentially identical as far as I have seen. (but as you know they changed a bit for the DA and QS and again for the MDD)
At the very least you should bump that CPU up by 50MHz.

 

[Unknown_K]

I won a Sawtooth board on ebay that was used with Dual G4 CPUs. It arrived a couple days ago with damaged parts from being shipped in an envelope (inductor trashed, couple capacitors ripped off the board, busted battery holder etc. Anyway after removing some parts from my motherboard I now have a working dual G4-500 Sawtooth machine (Uni-7 revision).

Xbench gives me 24.46 running under OSX 10.3.9 with a Radeom 7500, 1GB RAM, 80GB IDE HD.

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=502469

This is my G4 1.26Ghz Quicksilver scored 56.10

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=483847

And my other Quicksilver 800Mhz no cache scored 23.95

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=467288

So a Dual G4-500 scores slightly better then a Quickserv 800 with no L3 cache even with a slower FSB?

Also does using OSX 10.4.11 give better video scores then 10.3.9?