questions - upgrading a power mac G4. Any old school Mac people here?

[Major_Tom_coming_home]

I picked up a 1999 vintage Power Mac G4 450 running OS X 10.4 at a garage sale for $5 and have been having some fun tinkering with it. I've ordered an additional 1 gig of ram and a Mac version ATI Radeon 9000 AGP to replace the Rage 128 AGP the system came with. With the upgrades and system itsself, I've invested a whopping $25 so far .

 

I'm wondering if there are any inexpensive upgrades I can make to the CPU in the $50 and under range? I know that accelerators have been made for this machine, but as far as I can tell they were discontinued a long time ago and if you do find a used one they go for $150 and up. Unfortunately, I can't justify to myself spending that kind of money on an 18 year old Mac. I'm thinking that there won't be any options in this price range, but my knowledge of Power PC hardware is practically non existent. I know there is a 500mhz version of my cpu, but such an upgrade would barely make any difference (but if I found one cheap enough I'd try it anyway).

 

Thanks

 

 

[Flojomojo]

I had a machine like this. It's been a long time, and it depends what you want to do with this, but I guess you could always put Yellow Dog Linux on it.

 

I think the system bus is the limiting factor -- not much point in upgrading it faster than the system can process. There's a dual CPU version of that machine if you want to dabble in that. The relatively slow clock speeds of the Motorola machines are why Apple doubled up CPUs and eventually switched to Intel.

 

You might enjoy the Low End Mac forums.

 

Your machine is one of the last that nicely dual boots between OSX and OS9, so you should take advantage of that and play things like old Ambrosia Software games.

[Laner]

I've got a couple of slightly newer G4s (2002/2003 era), and have looked at upgrading them as well. At least for the models I have, CPU upgrades are very hard to come by, particularly 15 years after the fact. It always seemed like a very pricey, niche market.

 

You'd probably get better (and more available) bang for your buck by getting an SSD and an IDE->SATA converter - https://eshop.macsales.com/upgrades/apple-power-mac-g4-agp-graphics-sawtooth-450mhz-1999/internal-drives