Sonnet Technologies today announced the Encore/ST G4 Duet, a dual-processor G4 upgrade for Sawtooth (AGP) Power Mac G4s. The card will ship in a dual 500 MHz version in February for $1,000 and is fully compatible with Mac OS X.
Comments
The site lists only Sawtooth G4s as compatible, including the servers.
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/encore_st.html#compatibility
You'll be happy to know that XLR8 has your behind.
MPe
Frederico
Please for $1000 (even if someone discounts it to $800) I can get a whole new G4. Just trade it in and get a new/faster motherboard, four PCI slots and in the end a faster DUAL processor; 533mhz versus 500.
C'mon on I know they have to stay in business, but they themselves by pricing things way too high do it themselves.
I recently had a very bad experience with Sonnet, their products are generally overpriced for what you are getting, and they are dishonest about critical incompatibilities with other system components... Caveat Emptor!
In response to:
http://www.xlr8.com/ProductInfo/machvelocity/index.html
This *sounds* like it might work in G4 Cubes ?!?!
Any 100% yahs or neys?
Speed
If you want a new G4, wait til after the Keynote in about an hour and a half or maybe 2 hours from now.
Steve will intro some faster (although not 733) G4s in DUAL configs with faster motherboards I believe. If they don't go to 133 they will be even further behind beyond simple CPU speed (faster motherboard allows faster CPUs as the CPU can only work at certain number divisions of motherboard speed).
Just wait a few hours and see if this announcement has any merit for your situation (like if you can just get a discontinued G4 Dual 500 cheap).
I too was recently victimized by Sonnet. I ordered their G4-500 upgrade for my B&W G3-400. I installed it per the instructions provided, powered on, and started to run some proc benchmarks to see what performance increase I was getting with the new G4. After a few minutes of operation, my Mac locked up solid. After resetting, the system failed to find a boot disk, so I tried to restart it again, but this time, it was dead.
I reinserted the original G3 proc, but the system board was fried - no boot. I contacted Sonnet, which refunded my money (after I had an Apple tech "prove" that the system was toast, and paid $500 to get it replaced). When I asked Sonnet to reemburse me for the damage they had caused, I was told that, "Sonnet products never fail." I was further told that Sonnet had never ever sold a defective part, had never even heard of any defects in any of their products, and therefore, tough luck.
I told them that they had just lost a repeat customer (5 proc upgrades, video upgrades, cache upgrades, etc.), and that I would never purchase another product from Sonnet again. The tech that I worked with was genuinely concerned, but his boss (a marketing puke) couldn't care less.
I suggest everyone stay away form these thieves.
133 mhz system bus would be nice, but we are far from cpu speed limited by the 100 mhz bus we have now... The G4 has a 9X clock multiplier (and IBM has 10 X clock multiplier G3s)... So unless you have a 900mhz G4 handy, you arent hitting the limits as far as bus speed.
And keep in mind a 7500 with a 50mhz bus and a G4/450 card isnt much slower in cpu intensive tasks than an apple G4/450 with 100mhz bus... amazing aint it?
The XLR8 MP upgrade, MACh Velocity I believe, will run in PowerMacs G3 Beige, B&W and G4/PCI (with the Yikes! motherboard).
Looks like they are also doing a dual G4 upgrade for 7300 to 9600 Macs.
Doesn't look like there is something for the Cube or the Sawtooth G4s. But well, why would you want to plug-in $1000 in a nearly brand new system?
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b/w G3 Blues
I bought a b/w G3 the day after they went on sale. Will be able to upgrade to dual G4s? Its bad enough I have the first version of the b/w G3 which limits the number of harddrives I can install.