• Just looking around
    g4QS_redux
    Posts: 9 from 2010/8/25
    From: Germany
    > I take it this should rather be
    > directed at boot_wb, not at me ;-)

    Err, sure, actually the whole text I wrote was not directed only to you, but to anybody who is interested, maybe. Just my two cents, and I quoted you just to refer to a certain context.


    >> Power Macintosh G4 (PCI) boards are, however, limited to a maximum
    >> of 1GB physical memory

    > Yes, but that's PowerMac1,2, not PowerMac3,1.

    Sure, I know. I looked all those IDs up, just to do the readers of this forum a favour, for they are talking about them all the time - and though I am used to talking about "Sawtooths", "Quicksilvers", and such. It doesn?t really matter, though imho this is kind of boring and confusing.

    -----

    @Andreas_Wolf:
    > But I'd rather have a pointer to an actual and
    > official Apple document which states 1 GiB RAM
    > maximum for PowerMac3,1. That's what I
    > implicitely asked for in the first place.

    I don?t see the point in searching for a pointer. What would that be good for? If I had always followed Apple?s advice, I?d have bought a new Mac at least once in a period of two years within the past twenty years. ;-)

    I guess we are just interested in different aspects, for, though I?m prepared to take note of a company?s "official" documentation on their products, I consider third-party information on what customers can actually do with a product to be even more valuable.


    >> At the point in time these early G4 Macs were
    >> released, in 1999 or something, 512MB bars for
    >> these machines were simply not available to
    >> average customers

    > ...which didn't prevent Apple from specifying
    > their PowerMac3,1 (and PowerMac3,3) machines
    > for 1.5 GiB RAM maximum back then, which implies
    > the use of at least two 512 MiB bars.

    You mean "technically" specifying, in a sense that it would be possible to use memory bars which at the release date of a mainboard did not even exist? No, of course Apple would not unnecessarily restrict their (at the time) Power Mac G4 flagship series unless this is technically necessary (or unless Apple profit in other ways from such behaviour, e.g. by using cheaper components). Thus, Apple did not technically prevent their customers from using 4 x 512MB in one of the first PowerMacs, G4 (AGP). Usually, however, the specifications released e.g. in adverts (i.e. what is "officially" supported/featured by a hardware product of the Apple company) do not necessarily correspond to what customers can actually do with their equipment; just see lowendmac.com, to give you an example. I guess that if this would be technically possible (I don?t know) and if a hardware company had created 1GB memory bars for early PowerMac G4 computers, Apple would have neither prevented their customers from memory upgrading nor encouraged them to do so: After all, they want to sell new hardware and software products. Yet, if customers smash their computers as a result from their experiments this is no longer Apple?s problem: Just the usual story.

    Thus, I do not really mind about such things apart from what I can possibly do with my computing equipment: I?ll just wait for the next release of MorphOS and see if I can get it running, but to me it will be nothing more but a hobby project.
  • »01.09.10 - 01:41
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