What was your first experience with a Power Mac G4? Where, when, why?

I had only used one occasionally until 2005 when I bought a Digital Audio 466 from the University of Colorado surplus auction. I spent all day at that auction (literally from 9 AM until 5 PM) fending off predators and resellers to buy just one G4. The surplus had oodles of the things including Sawtooth, GigE, and Digital Audio machines. The G4 came pretty stock and with a wiped hard drive. A couple hundred dollars later, and it became a dual 1 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, 650 GB+ storage, Radeon 9600 Pro power house. Along the way, I had to send two motherboards and a power supply to the great big trash can in the sky. But now the whole kit is sitting in a Power Mac 8600 case as a nice little sleeper.

Well, how about you? What are your experiences with your first G4?

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

My first experience with a Power Mac G4 was this summer. I bought one off of eBay for $68.75, local pickup, to be my main Mac. It was very memorable because the seller was drunk.

No way, really?! That's crazy! You should have told him/her it was $16.80. The numbers sound so similar that if he/she really was drunk, you might have taught that seller a lesson...

I mean, really, who gets drunk and sells a G4?

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

Yeah, they were really drunk.

A slight perversion of your Fred, Drew, but as good a place as any for my question ...

From Him Who Must Not Be Named I have bought a number of G3 and G4, 400 and 500MHz ZIF cards. I plan to use G4/500s by Sonnet in a Beige G3 DT and a Beige G3 MT.

Sonnet is very coy (on its site. Perhaps not in the original retail box, where I suspect that they did provide a jumper block.) about the matter of jumpers, referring only to their own secret recipe via software for bus multiplier, &c.

The references from non-Sonnet pages make no mention of s/w versus jumper configuration, although OWC (or XLR8 Your Mac) provide an extensive tabulation for standard and overclocked configurations.

My question is simple. Sonnet s/w alone, ignoring the present jumper settings for a G3/400MHz? Sonnet s/w alone, with all jumpers off? Sonnet s/w, but also jumpering to configure for a G4/500MHz?

I have to suppose that bus speed at least should be selected by jumpering appropriately, and very probably cache multiplier, too. I am also consumed with curiosity about HWMNBN's source for so many ZIF upgrade cards, but that is another matter.

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

If the Sonnet software does anything at all, it will be to enable the cache (or set the appropriate backside cache bus speed). So I'd experiment with it and with out it to see if it is really necessary. The cards (I have two: http://www.ppcmla.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=242) bypass the motherboard's CPU multiplier jumpers and use an on-board system to determine the CPU speed from the bus speed of the host Mac.

Good find. And HWMNBN does seem to have a good supply of processors. I'm thinking he must be some sort of "recycler" of old computer equipment.

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

Diverging further OT, I have thought as you do since first I discovered him in April(?). What puzzles me is the lack of, say, complete daughter-cards, especially since the CPUs range almost the complete history of personal computing.

BOT, my Beige DT G3/400MHz, with no change to its jumpering, converted to G4/500MHz in a trice. Drop in and go, so to speak, with OS 9.2.2. I don't plan to use OS X because I shall be using OS 9 apps, Spark 2.6, Toast 5.2.3 and Jam 2.6.

The Beige G3 MT, also G3/400MHz, was the absolute converse. It now boots from nothing, stalling 5s after the appearance of splash screen and before the Sonnet sub-panel, or giving bomb/bus error during boot from all/any boot volumes (including external SCSI, and only FW not being tried), with or without all others disconnected. In this case I had re-jumpered for 500MHz. Of even more consequence, however, I suspect is that I pre-installed too recent a version (ie, 3.1 instead of 2.3.1) of the Sonnet software: one that installed Sonnet's CP Startup DiskX and disabled the normal OS 9.2.2 version of the CP. I shall resume the attack today by removing and 're-educating' one of the HDDs from the MT.

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

If you can't get it to work with older Sonnet software, the problem may be dead cache. That sounds about right for some SRAM which is no longer any good...

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

As I suspected. I took another drive with a good installation of OS 9.2.2, but no Sonnet extension, and installed the 2.3.1 version of the Sonnet software. Installed the HDD as Master on ATA bus 0, and Bingo! A case in which the latest and greatest(?) was not the best-advised.

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

DA 533 single that I bought a little before the time the Intel Macs were released. I thought it was finally time to try a Mac other than the woefully outdated 68k and PPC 601 machines I had been collecting. It was formerly a school lease that was being traded in so naturally it was a bare minimum configuration with only 256mb, 20gb and Rage 128 graphics. I bumped it to 768 mb and installed a flashed Radeon 9700 and it runs Tiger fine. Something happened to it recently, though, because the built in ethernet port stopped working the same night we had a thunderstorm. I think a surge fried it. I don't have a wi fi adapter or a separate ethernet card for it so it's been offline ever since. Still, cool machine with lots of upgrade possibilities but for the cost of upgrades a G5 machine would be in reach so it's probably not worth it.

Hrm, first "experience" would have been at some point in my job of on-site computer support. Couldn't tell you exactly when or where.

First I owned would be my pair of Digital Audio machines I got for $100, and it turned out one had a dual 1 GHz upgrade! I later fried the dual CPU card. But, I did get a 1.5 GHz single G4 card for it later, along with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600, so it's happily chugging along now.

(Yes, Quadraman, I'm stalking you, replying to all of your new posts... MUAHAHAHA!!!)

My initial experience was buying one off of eBay a few years ago. Single G4/400, 512MB RAM and a dead hard disk. Later I bought a dual G4/450 processor for it. Still have with with 640MB RAM, a 20GB hard disk and a DVD combo drive running 10.4.11.

I use it for tinkering with web pages.

My first experience was a Power Mac G4 Dual 450 MHz Gigabit Ethernet. With ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64Mb in and stock hard drive and DVD. 2 weeks after buying from my friend i clocked two 7400 to their nominal frequencies - 500MHz. 4 months later i was buying Sonnet SATA PCI and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.
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To Be Continued...

First experience was rescuing an old but not so beaten up PowerMac G4 400MHz. It is about to be thrown away on the dumpster.

Cleaned it up, put some hard drive on it, fired it up and it booted on Panther.

Since then, I have bought some things for it;
1. ATI Radeon 9200 PCI Graphics card
2. New Pram battery
3. Another 40GB hard disk
4. Bluetooth dongle
5. Apple Pro keyboard and Mouse
6. Installed Tiger and OS9 on dual boot

Recently, have done a slight overclock to 450MHz.

It is sweet!

Several years ago I got a 9500 and a 9600, both with a G4/800 processor card, from eBay, and when the 9500 went away it's G4 card went into an 8600/200. Still have both machines though the 8600 has been downgraded to a G3/450. Some time later I got a dual processor MDD that sits and cranks away on some scientific programs most of the time.

Well, if the Beige G3 with the G4 ZIF doesn't count, my first PowerMac G4 was the Digital Audio described at length here. Adapted ATX power supply and later added dual 533MHz CPU.