page 5
Segment Two -
Processor
Performance Boosts
November
1st , 2003
I have to admit that this is my favorite part of any Mac upgrade. It gives me a thrill to handle some often beautifully engineered circuit boards and see the dramatic speed bump from an older Mac these kits can give.
Processor upgrade kits from the three of four major manufacturers gain faster and faster G4 engines every two of three months it seems. So rather than review the fastest kits available, which you can find most anywhere from online performance sites, we thought that we would pick a couple representative brands and show how easy they are to install.
Sure, we’ll also benchmark them against the original processor, against each other and also against some new G4 PowerMacs. But, our main objective is to view these two kits as representative of that manufacturers quality and install ability.
Up for the challenge
were a well-known veteran upgrade kit builder (Sonnet Technology) and
a relatively new name (Giga Designs), both producing state-of-the-art
maximum performance G4 kits.
Sonnet's
Encore/ST G4-1.2 GHz kit is eligantly simple
I seriously doubt that Sonnet needs any introductions, as they have been making Mac upgrade kits for nearly a decade. One of the two “old timers” left, Sonnet has kits for desktop or portable Macs that are pre-G3 and include PCI, ZIFF or Daughter Card type assemblies.
For our purposes, we
used Sonnet’s Encore/ST G4-1.2 GHz kit in one of our two matching
November 1999 manufactured G4 400MHz “Sawtooth” AGP models.
At the time we started this story, the SG4-1200-2M 1.2 GHz kit was Sonnet’s
top of the line. Since, they have also produced a 1.4 GHz kit. If you’d
like to see the specs and details on the 1.2 GHz kit, please click
here. Again, other than the comparative benchmark tests, you
should view this Sonnet kit as representative of their product line.
The Encore/ST G4-1.2 GHz boasts a 2 MB DDR L3 cache and 256 KB on chip L2 cache. The list price if the SG4-1200-2M is US$449. The Sonnet kits have no software, switches, or jumpers to configure, of course that means that there will be no over-clocking either.
The Sonnet kits are extremely well manufactured with years of sound engineering expertise behind them. Our experience with watching the many online Mac help/chat boards is that buyers rarely have any problems.
The other kit in our
story is from relative newcomer Giga
Designs, hailing from Fremont California and just across
the San Francisco Bay from the Apple Cupertino campus. I came across Giga
Design at the 2003 MWSF Conference and was very impressed with their design,
quality of manufacture and especially pricing. Giga Designs provided us
with a G-celerator GC5-1000-D2 1.0 GHz kit.
Like the Sonnet
kit, the Giga Designs kit has a full 2MB of DDR L3 cache, along with 64KB
L1 and 256KB L2 on chip cache. Unlike the Sonnet kit, Giga Designs uses
a Motorola 7455 PowerPC processor chip. The Giga Designs kits uses jumper
setting for processor speed, as of this writing anyway. However, those
jumpers are preset at the factory and are something you don’t need
to worry about. If you’re thinking of doing a bit of over-clocking,
remember that it will void your warranty.
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