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G4 Sawtooth with Dual G4-500 upgrade problem
Posted by: Unknown_K on 2010-11-20 16:52:32
I have a G4-400 Sawtooth that I upgraded to dual G4-500's. On a 20GB HD I have OS 9.2.2 installed and it works fine (systems seems both G4's at the correct speed). My problem comes when I try to install any version of OSX on the 80GB HD. I tried 10.3 and 10.4 and both boot and then go to the please reboot the system screen error. I have tried using different RAM and swapped the DVD drive with a pionere DVD-R drive to make sure it was not a media problem. Any ideas?

Posted by: Byrd on 2010-11-20 18:20:46
Is your motherboard UNI-N compatible (ie. compatible with a dual G4?)

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G4ZONE/G4_dual_processor_swap/Dual_G4_page1.html

JB

Posted by: Unknown_K on 2010-11-20 18:57:39
Well I guess I didn't check that before, and it is a uni-n 3 model 🙁

So will a GiGE motherboard fit and work in a G4 sawtooth case?

Posted by: beachycove on 2010-11-20 18:59:38
It's a shame because I am still marveling at how much better my Cube is than stock with a dual G4 500 upgrade. Dual G4s are the way to go in OSX if you can.

Posted by: Unknown_K on 2010-11-20 19:11:44
Its not like I need a dual G4 Sawtooth, I do have a 1.25Ghz Quicksilver, but it would have been fun to play with on the cheap. A single G4-400 just doesn't sound like as much fun.

Posted by: MacJunky on 2010-11-20 21:38:59
Physically GBE and Sawtooth boards are(from any of my side-by side observations) pretty much identical in shape and size. they do use a slightly different PSU pinout though (IIRC GBE is the same as DA PSU and QS is different than DA)

Some of the other things of the board are slightly different like the gigabit ethernet on one and the internal firewire on the sawtooth, but they both have pads for eachother's stuff. 😛

Posted by: Unknown_K on 2010-11-20 22:03:35
Not a good swap then. I installed the original g4-400 into the sawtooth and OSX installed without a problem.

Posted by: jruschme on 2010-11-21 04:41:38
K,

What's the motherboard version on your Sawtooth? 820-1093-A (v1) or 820-1094-A (v2)?

John

Posted by: MacJunky on 2010-11-21 09:03:49
Not a good swap then. I installed the original g4-400 into the sawtooth and OSX installed without a problem.
Well, if you have a GBE board and PSU or setup an ATX PSU or just mess around with the pins on your Sawtooth PSU It is not that bad of a swap because you gain gigabit ethernet and you also gain the ability to use dual CPUs if your Sawtooth board was old. The cases *should* be essentially identical as far as I have seen. (but as you know they changed a bit for the DA and QS and again for the MDD)
At the very least you should bump that CPU up by 50MHz. 😛

Posted by: Unknown_K on 2011-02-02 06:03:20
I won a Sawtooth board on ebay that was used with Dual G4 CPUs. It arrived a couple days ago with damaged parts from being shipped in an envelope (inductor trashed, couple capacitors ripped off the board, busted battery holder etc. Anyway after removing some parts from my motherboard I now have a working dual G4-500 Sawtooth machine (Uni-7 revision).

Xbench gives me 24.46 running under OSX 10.3.9 with a Radeom 7500, 1GB RAM, 80GB IDE HD.

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=502469

This is my G4 1.26Ghz Quicksilver scored 56.10

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=483847

And my other Quicksilver 800Mhz no cache scored 23.95

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=467288

So a Dual G4-500 scores slightly better then a Quickserv 800 with no L3 cache even with a slower FSB?

Also does using OSX 10.4.11 give better video scores then 10.3.9?

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