I used to have a Sawtooth G4 400mhz but that's long gone now. The machine was very easy to open up and work on, had plenty of room for expansion and it ran like a charm to the last day I had it (when I sold it, I was running OS X Tiger). My only complaint is having to find a Mac compatible video card as the stock card is somewhat anemic. Also, the machine I had ran very quiet and cool but I hear the machines new enough to have DDR memory and CPUs past the 1ghz mark get pretty noisy.

Seeing as DDR memory was crippled and actually didn't run as DDR in the later models, I'd avoid those as the performance gain over the Quicksilver models is probably negligible and also, the DDR models seem to command an absurd price premium. If you want a G4, the Sawtooth models are probably the sweet spot of the line. The only one to specifically avoid, however, are the Yikes models as you don't have AGP and the motherboard is crippled.

I've got a Beige G3 tower Power Mac, a Blue G3 iMac and a G4 eMac. Of the three, only the G4 gets used (as a browser/recipe finder on the kitchen worktop) - the rest are just too slow running any version of OS X (including all the way back to 10.2 on the G3 tower).

I have a 533mhz Digital Audio. It's not worth maxing them out at this point as the parts would cost far too much money compared to a PC. I have a Powermac 7500 that I maxed out with a 1ghz G4, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9200 and it's not worth the expense. For all the money you would put into it you would be better off getting a first generation Mac Pro so at least you can still use the latest Mac OS and software.

sliderider wrote:

to a PC. I have a Powermac 7500 that I maxed out with a 1ghz G4, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9200 and it's not worth the expense.

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Sounds super though what you have done with such an old machine... there's a dude on youtube with something like your machine. But yeah, parts are pricey for this, and it can't pplay many games can it? But damn, those cases and upgrade parts look so sweet.

I have a Sawtooth G4, used it as my primary machine a few years ago. Unfortunately the power supply died and apparently took the motherboard with it. I've kept the case around, thinking maybe I'd eventually do a mATX PC conversion on it.

I also have a 500mhz iMac G3, a 233mhz Wallstreet Powerbook G3 (which is my main laptop), and two Power Computing clones... a Powercenter Pro with a 210mhz 604e, 256MB RAM, and a Voodoo2, running OS 8.6, and a Powertower Pro with a 400mhz G3 upgrade, 448MB RAM, and a Radeon 7000, running OS 9.2.2. And for 68K, I have a Centris 660AV, a Performa 460 and a Performa 475.

But yeah, parts are pricey for this, and it can't play many games can it?

A G4 is a complete waste on a machine like that, as is 1GB RAM, but a 300-400mhz G3 is attainable pretty cheaply, and anything over ~192MB RAM is fine for the OS 8/9. There were a whole bunch of games for the PPC Macs running the Classic OS... more than for OSX by far.

sgt76 wrote:

sliderider wrote:

to a PC. I have a Powermac 7500 that I maxed out with a 1ghz G4, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9200 and it's not worth the expense.

\

Sounds super though what you have done with such an old machine... there's a dude on youtube with something like your machine. But yeah, parts are pricey for this, and it can't pplay many games can it? But damn, those cases and upgrade parts look so sweet.

It's a great rig for Diablo and Quake. 😁

Here's a sample of what you can do with one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ZR_DkauS4

(No, it's not my video)

sliderider wrote:

Here's a sample of what you can do with one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ZR_DkauS4

(No, it's not my video)

Yups, watched this many times... superb hot rodded old rig...

check this one out too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzebHX01amg&pl … 74B7852A6544C5E

It's interesting that the G4 (aka PPC 7400) is really just a G3 with SIMD. That's like the PII to PIII transition.

It's also fun to find all of the high tension fanboy articles that claim how totally amazing the G3 and G4 were and yet see how Athlon and P3 blew past them due to the rapid clock speed increases that IBM/Motorola couldn't match. 🤣 Although it was likely that IBM didn't want to devote the resources just for Apple and that's what led Apple to move to Intel.