Sonnet SG4-1000-2M Encore/ST Encore/ST G4 1.0 GHz Processor Upgrade Card

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




Late for G4, but not too late, June 7, 2008
By David M (Zionsville, IN USA)
So I get this Sonnet upgrade, a decent price for this version (pricey for the higher speed version), and I wonder if it's a dumb idea. After all, my old Mac G4 Digital Audio is long of tooth, but otherwise a great computer. The CRT is beautiful and sharp. I would love to put Leopard on it. I slap in enough new memory to get it to 1.25 Gigs, now it's plenty. I get the I GHz Sonnet card. And it is very, very snappy. It took less than an hour to take out the old board, and snap in the new one (even though I read the wrong section of the instructions). It's pretty straight forward. The memory swap took 8 minutes.

So I am all ready to try Leopard. But do I need to? Tiger runs very quickly: Word open like a shot, Safari is very snappy. In fact, after putting in the high speed card, I upgrade all the software to 4.11 (including all the Java updates, QT, etc.). I am not sure I NEED Leopard.

But I do need a DVD/CD player. My version did not have the SuperDrive. Does this ever end?

It is great as a supplementary work computer for home. I can quickly get to my office computer over the web and download anything I might have forgotten. It's the only Mac I have that still runs OS 9, so I need it to open very old documents -- at least I think so.

I think it was worth the $150+ for the Accelerator. I probably have extended its useful life another couple of years. I'll update after the SuperDrive is installed. But do I still need Leopard?



easy install works fine, June 27, 2007
By M. Broderick
I needed an inexpensive upgrade to use/try out iLife '06 (700Mhz min).
The upgrade CPU was easy to install (good directions) and works fine. 1hz was adequate for Garageband.



Nice bump in speed, April 2, 2007
By John Black (Nashville, Tennessee)
Our Digital Audio 533 G4 was beginning to feel a little pokey, so I was interested in at least a 1GHz G4 card. I opted for this slowest of the faster G4 cards because I don't expect to keep this machine more than maybe two years, and the price of this card was the best I found.

I read thru the installation instructions, which are tailored to the various versions of the G4 tower. Reading these really helped, because I was able to complete the switchover in less than ten minutes. The new processor card worked immediately on startup. I'm running Mac OS X 10.3.9.

The speed increase is subtle but noticeable. Online videos are smoother, pages load more quickly, and windows on the computer open and close more quickly.

This was a good choice. We got some added speed while keeping our PCI slots, something a new iMac or Mini don't offer. Not as fast as those newer machines, but more versatile for our purposes.



Mis-leading description of product, January 9, 2007
By MysterE Producer (San Francisco, CA)
I searched in Amazon for a 1.4 GHz processor upgrade. The Amazon search engine gave me the page for this product, which I purchased. Unfortunately, it was a 1 GHz processor, which was slower than I thought I was purchasing. Amazon displayed a mis-leading description of the product, so I am very disappointed. The Sonnet accelerator product was fine, just slower than I wanted. I would hestitate about purchasing products from Amazon in the future, as it appears they mis-lead consumers so that they can dump discontinued products.



Great, except for the instructions., March 30, 2006
By Coronet Blue (California)
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.