 ENCORE/ST PROCESSOR CARD UPGRADE G4 home electronics. |
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ENCORE/ST PROCESSOR CARD UPGRADE G4
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List Price: $591.68
Our Price:
$183.99
You Save: $407.69
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ENCORE/ST PROCESSOR CARD UPGRADE G4 Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Great, except for the instructions.
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One little secret about OS X is that all the cool looking stuff it does slows things to a crawl on machines in the 400-500 range. This surprised me because I had one drive with OS X and one with OS 9. OS 9 was very snappy on my G4/400 but OS X was spinning ball hell.
This upgrade made a dramatic improvement and for under $200 you get a machine that is at least capable of running GarageBand, handling big Photoshop files, etc. Its hard to guage the speed but I'd say everything's faster but nothing's instant.
The installation should be foolproof but due to unclear instructions, not quite. Here's the deal. Sonnet used to ship these boards without a heat sink. They provided directions for salvaging the Mac's existing heat sink and reusing it. Apparently, not all Mac users are up on their thermodynamics and they failed to properly re-mount the heat sink causing the card to fail.
The good news is, the card I received had both a heat sink and a fan. The bad news is that the instructions show the older setup with detailed instructions as to how to swap out the heat sink. Also incorrect is the mention that you need a medium Phillips screwdriver. You need a fairly small Phillips because the screwdriver has to pass through holes drilled in the included heat sink and an "average" Phillips screwdriver will be too fat.
Finally, with most machines you'll need to download a firmware update so your Mac will recognize the new card. But since you do this before you install the card, you're left wondering what will happen when you have the new firmware but have yet to install the new card. Will the machine restart? (Yes) Do you need to swap proccesors before restarting? (No).
The bottom line is, this is a nice upgrade and simple to accomplish. But decent instructions would take a lot of the anxiety out of it. |
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