Then I booted the Mac OS 9.2.1 CD and wiped the target, installed OS 9, and presto, the "Happy Mac" boot icon greeted me from the spare drive. I grabbed a spare "expendable" drive, a short ATA cable, and plugged it into the Apple ATA connector after pulling the cables off the ATA card. I have a Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA 133 card supporting four Maxtor internal beasts, and I had never tried booting Mac OS 9 after installing that card 6 months ago. and OS 9 was still not an option dawning of the root problem was in the hard drive controller card. and up came OS X (?!!), and all sorts of other junk (time so far: 2-1/2 hours). the OS X drive (?), installed the original Apple CPU (hey - I got original benchmark numbers while there). So I booted the 9.2.1 CD and installed a fresh 9 on one of the OS-less drives. I hadn't booted 9 on this Mac in a while, and it simply refused to be coerced into starting up in Mac OS 9.
Install the processor - three screws out and in.
The Apple to OWC Mercury processor upgrade a couple years ago took literally 10 minutes, and yes, it's been up for most of the past few years without too many kernel panics and the like (OK PC guys, Mac's do crash, and we've been blowing smoke when we say they don't. Usually the gods are either smiling-or at least not paying attention-when I start messing with my own hardware. The G4 will move to very a very respectable server job down the road. Since I am not buying a G5 tower to tide me over until the MacPro move, I wanted (probably as much as needed) the boost that TWO processors bring to the table-and if I'm going to slap down cash for an upgrade, it made sense to get the top end product. "No" answer: The dual processor solution has real applications in the heavy processing end of things, like video processing and the higher end applications. It's a pain when Photoshop CS2 panics the machine 5 times in a row when I'm trying to get work done. But then I also had a flaky RAM module I replaced at the same time as today's upgrade, and there were some other "phase of the moon" issues. "Maybe" answer: There were some stability issues that I never tracked down and I started getting the gut feeling that it might be a CPU bug. "Yes" answer: For most of my needs, the single G4 OWC upgrade rocked. Second question: Wasn't the 1.33 Ghz OWC processor fast enough to meet your needs. In the real world this is a true measure of how a single application will cook on the processor, but it isn't being dragged down at all by the other tasks running under OS X - which also rocks on a dual CPU machine.
Something that measures the base CPU ability. the XBench application, for the most part, only beats on one of the processors. Note- The dual G4 benchmark doesn't represent the true picture. I'll get into the "gotchas" in a minute, but first let me wow you with some raw performance data. The transition from the OWC 1.33 GHz single G4 was not without a few glitches, and I had a graduation party to attend mid afternoon, so the applied time to figure this all out and work around the issues took somewhere around 4-1/2 hours. For a shade under $600 Other World Computing shipped a Sonnet Duet 1.8 GHz G4 processor upgrade to me on a Saturday Morning - 9:30AM - And I'm creating this web page at 5:00PM running on this wicked dual processor G4 tower. This weekend (early June, 2006) I upgraded my G4 Digital Audio to it's ultimate performance level. Particularly interested to see what people have for my bolded results above.Marc's Notes: Comments, Ramblings, Rants & Tips G4 Digital Audio CPU Benchmarks Xbench here if you could please post your results and your machine specs (just need the disk test): FWIW, the drive is attached to my primary (SATA6) port, and TRIM is enabled. I'm wondering if these are just odd for this particular benchmark, or if the 840 evo has trouble with OSX. I just ran some Xbench tests on my old 2011 MBP + a samsung 840 evo SSD, but the random read numbers look suspiciously low.