Seamless Computing

Sonnet makes processor upgrade cards, among other products, for Macintosh computers. Over the years we've used several of their accelerator boards, all without a problem.

I bought this G4 board for a Power Mac G4 Digital Audio tower computer. The original computer had a stock 533MHz processor, so the 1GHz Sonnet board nearly doubles the processing power of the original. I use Photoshop quite a bit, and the added horsepower is evident, from loading the application into memory, to opening photos, to digital editing of photos. Internet page loading is also noticeably faster, as are online videos. There are absolutely no bugs such as the ones that used to plague 68040 processor boards. I haven't found heat buildup to be a problem. For a variety of user experiences, the website xlr8yourmac.com offers a number of comments.

Installation of the Sonnet G4 board is not difficult, though it requires a degree of mechanical inclination. It's not as easy as installing ZIF boards in G3 machines, as a screwdriver and a bit of extra care and patience are required. Aligning the data connector is the first order of business, followed by securing the board with screws to the logic board. It's reasonable to expect the whole process to take no more than 15 minutes. Due to extra heat output, a fan unit mounts on top of this processor, which accounts for the extra care and time necessary to properly install the upgrade.

The Sonnet instructions may require you to install software first, though I found that to be unnecessary in my case. OS X has so many built-in drivers that it's often unnecessary to install drivers. I've heard of cases, however, where a user had to boot into OS 9 to install driver updates.

I checked around on the internet a good bit and found the best price for a new board at Amazon. Because of the cost, Amazon gives free shipping on this item.