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Even though I have a G4 upgrade in my old Beige G3, I'm reluctant to recommend getting such anymore--mostly because when I got mine I didn't have much of an alternative. If you are considering this 1 GHz G4 upgrade, note that it is half the cost of a Mac mini which would be a considerably more substantial upgrade than just the CPU (and certainly shouldn't have any problems playing any DivX files).

D'Eyncourt wrote:

Even though I have a G4 upgrade in my old Beige G3, I'm reluctant to recommend getting such anymore--mostly because when I got mine I didn't have much of an alternative. If you are considering this 1 GHz G4 upgrade, note that it is half the cost of a Mac mini which would be a considerably more substantial upgrade than just the CPU (and certainly shouldn't have any problems playing any DivX files).

Yes, you are right. I thought about that too. I plan on spending no more then $150 on video card and cpu upgrade... hopefully. I feel I have too much invested in my G3... can't part with it just yet.

Alien wrote:

If you're going to put a 1 GHz CPU in a B&W, go for the PowerLogix G3 upgrade. It won't slow your bus down from 100 to 66 MHz, and will give the G4 a run for its money.

,xtG
.tsooJ

yea, thats exactly what im looking at.

about video cards... how is the GeForce 5500FX or 5200 compared to radeons?
i have a samsung lcd that had both dvi and vga inputs. would it matter much which one i use, vga or dvi?

ottoman.lsu wrote:

Thanks for the help. Your second link goes to the 7000 search. But I was gonna buy it off of ebay from a trusted seller. the difference there in price is about $40.

I guess I'll be trying to get the 1ghz upgrade too.

Thanks for the help.

Oops fixed and I blame the Valium.

ottoman.lsu wrote:

Alien wrote:

If you're going to put a 1 GHz CPU in a B&W, go for the PowerLogix G3 upgrade. It won't slow your bus down from 100 to 66 MHz, and will give the G4 a run for its money.

,xtG
.tsooJ

yea, thats exactly what im looking at.

about video cards... how is the GeForce 5500FX or 5200 compared to radeons?
i have a samsung lcd that had both dvi and vga inputs. would it matter much which one i use, vga or dvi?

A CPU upgrade will help.  For things that take advantage of AltiVec (some video codecs might) a G4 might have an advantage over a similarly-clocked G3 -- otherwise, they'll perform roughly the same.  The only real reason to get a G4 at this point is the ability to run Leopard.  It's been reported that the kernel and all of Leopard's bundled apps perform a CPU check, and will refuse run on a G3 without some exquisite hack (I doubt it will even be attempted).  Of course it's up to you to decide whether the G4 is worth the extra dough, but if G4's are still outrageously overpriced (I haven't checked in a while), I'd imagine you're going to stick with a G3.

As for the video card upgrade, it will NOT help video playback AT ALL. As bat wrote, the hardware is there, but the requisite driver/software combination only exists in Windows.  The only hardware-accelerated codec on Macs right now is MPEG-1/2 -- The objective here is to conserve battery life while watching DVDs on Apple laptops.  With the current management, this situation is unlikely to change...  However, a video card upgrade WILL help speed up Leo's snazzy new GUI effects (should you decide to take the plunge).  For that, you'd ideally want something that supports Core Image.  I'm not sure which cards support CI, but the 9200 does not.

Good luck.