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Sawtooth for $35!

TheMacGuy

TheMacGuy

68000
So, I was browsing though craigslist looking for another Mac to add the collection, and all of a sudden, I see a Power Mac G4 for $50. I called, and I spoke to the lady to see what was included, and it was just the computer. No power cable, no monitor, no keyboard, nothing. So I was able to talk her down to $35 for it. She did let me test it before I handed her the cash. She found a monitor and hooked it up. It was booting into OS 9 before she all of sudden pulled out the power cable. So I opened it and found a ATI Rage video card, 2 sticks of RAM, 10GB HDD, no AirPort, and a DVD drive. Once I got it home I looked at the system specs tag on the back and it said:

350MHz/1MB Cache/64MB SDRAM/10GB HDD/DVD-ROM/56K Modem/KB

I looked at the HDD and RAM. HDD was a 10GB 5400 RPM Western Digital (Apple Certified) and it has a very odd casing and the RAM was upgraded. 2 sticks of RAM, 1 marked 512MB, other is not marked at all. It has a factory installed Rage 128 Pro card. After some Wikipedia-ing, I found out it was the baseline model with the upgraded graphics card, and user upgraded RAM. It was manufactured and purchased in 2000, do the HDD having a manufacture date of January 15, 2000 and the model was discontinued in July of 2000.

I have confirmed that it is a Sawtooth because it has a Firewire 400 port internally. I wonder why that was put there.

 
Nice. Another tell-tale sign is that the Sawtooth was the last model of PM that had the green/amber power button. After that they were white.

 
I think it's because Firewire was still new. It was envisioned as a universal interconnect. Apple wanted to use it on external and internal drives. Sony wanted to network AV equipment with it. Heck you can even send TCP/IP over Firewire.

 
I seem to remember that Sony's iLink was originally envisioned as not only an I/O but also as a communications link so that your receiver could talk to your DVD player, TV, etc (switch the receiver to DVD and the DVD player automatically turns on, TV switches inputs, etc). Since firewire is a peering type of protocol, it's a lot "smarter" than the master-slave USB arrangement.

 
Well, I was able to get the eMac to recognize the 2 512MB sticks that came with the Cube, so I was left with 3 PC-100 256MB chips. Put one in the Cube and 2 in the Sawtooth. I just need to get the DVI to ADC converter Apple made to hook it up to the Cube's monitor. I would get the original monitor, if I had more room. I also slapped in an Seagate 7200rpm 40GB ATA-100 HDD as a new boot up drive. I am keeping the original 10GB Western Digital - Apple Certified HDD with OS 9 installed because I have never seen Apple use WD before, and its my only vintage Mac with its factory HDD.

 
Exactly. I guess Apple was the only one to make a DVI to ADC converter, due to the fact that the brick would need to supply video, USB, and power to the monitor.

 
Ah man I didn't mean to put it in your face about the price, I thought I read you were hooking the cube to a dvi monitor ...

I have one of those screens and have thought about rigging a dvi adapter for it. There is an instructables how to add a power jack and a dvi inlet to them. I gotta find it.

 
Naw, don't worry about it. I've been looking at the prices on eBay and you weren't wrong. Maybe beginning of the year I might get one, along with that damn SuperDrive for my Retina MBP. I can't believe I've been able to go this long with out the disc drive. [proud moment] I've gone 3 months without a disc drive! [/proud moment] [mad moment] I can't play that damn movie on my MBP [/mad moment]

 
If it doesn't matter the brand, I got a belkin for $10 off ebay and although I haven't been able to boot from it on my macbook, it will mount and play dual layer DVDs with no fuss. It also worked for XP install in parallels.

 
Did some minor upgrades, just installed a 2nd HDD and tri-booted it. Here are the new specs:

350MHz PPC G4

768MB of RAM

10GB Western Digital Caviar 5400 rpm (original Apple Certified HDD) with fresh factory install of OS 9.0.2

40GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm HDD with a dual boot of OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.11

ATI Rage 128 Pro G. card

 
I finally got a DVI to ADC adapter on eBay for $80. It is practically brand new. If fact, it still has the plastic wrap on the brick!

Sawtooth is running good. Planing on someday upgrading the RAM. Probably not any time soon though. A new PRAM battery is also needed. I also tried to run the PM with the door down, but the fan for the graphics card started making a loud whirr. Maybe the fan is slightly off?

 
4x512MB RAM should be cheap to get if you look around. Both my Sawtooths were upgraded to dual G4-500's (also cheap if you look around). Nice little machines.

 
4x512MB RAM should be cheap to get if you look around. Both my Sawtooths were upgraded to dual G4-500's (also cheap if you look around). Nice little machines.
Click to expand...
You have to be careful, though, if you want to do a dual-CPU upgrade. Older versions of the Sawtooth have a version (ver 3) of the Uni-North (Uni-N) chip which does not allow dual-CPUs under Mac OS X. One of the upgrade companies makes a utility which will tell you the version of the chip in yours.

 
Yea, I ran into that issue with my first unit, but G4 motherboards are dirt cheap on ebay (where I got my replacement board). Basically any G4 tower is worth little more then scrap (except maybe the last MDD) so deals can be found until they all get recycled.

 
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