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Power Mac G4 with Sonnet upgrade
Posted by: joshc on 2020-06-03 05:43:15
I acquired a Power Mac G4 with Sonnet upgrade for a very good price from eBay. Asked the seller to remove the handles which they did and it arrived in one piece!

The original speed was 400 MHz but with the Sonnet upgrade this will be higher now, I don't know the clock speed yet.

I did a quick power on test with monitor plugged in, chimes and displays video fine. I don't have any system discs that will work with it yet, but that's the next thing to sort. The machine does not have any drives so I am just working out my options for putting an SSD in here.

My plans for this machine are:

  • Full disassembly / tear down
  • Full clean of every part
  • Inspect PSU, make a judgement on recapping
  • Replace electrolytic capacitors on the logic board
  • SSD conversion
  • Add a spinning disk of some sort
  • Find a Sonnet Tempo SATA card
  • Install OS 9 / OS X
  • Set up a file server
  • Install some games
  • Eventually find an internal Zip drive to add to it
  • Enjoy it



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Posted by: joshc on 2020-06-03 15:50:57
Managed to boot from a Tiger disc and open System Profiler, the Sonnet upgrade is a single 1.6 GHz CPU.
Posted by: Huxley on 2020-06-05 01:01:40
Badass machine! Really cool to see such a high-clockspeed CPU upgrade in there - congrats 🙂  
Posted by: olePigeon on 2020-06-05 01:57:15
Quite a step up from stock 😉 .  Sonnet made some insane upgrades for those machines, including the Sonnet Duet dual 1.8GHz.  😱
Posted by: joshc on 2020-06-06 00:33:31
Restoration thread started:
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