I'm looking to supercharge my G4. What are my options?

Maybe it is a bit too late, but well, i want to answer. First of all, i recommend to maximaze amount of RAM. 2GB with copper heatsinks on modules especially. Second thing, i would recommend a graphics card: ATI FireGL X3, which could be flashed to ATI Radeon X800 XT. This card will give you more graphic performance. The third. Disks. Nowadays it is nos usual to have a SSDs. Power Mac can use them too, but you need a good controller, the best one is Xserve G5 PCI RAID Card with four SATA-1 Channels. This card can do hardware RAID-5 with four SSDs (i recommend Intel X25-M) in your Power Mac. Same setup i have in my Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, so i know what im say.

P.S.: Forgott to say, that your Mac can AirPort 5GHz with proper hardware, too, with native drivers of course.

Sounds like a LOT of money to pump into a nearly 15 year old PowerMac!

I have a G4 MDD 1.25 Ghz version (2003) of this Mac with 2 GBs of RAM, 256 MBs ATI X800XT (purchased very inexpensively from eBay).

I did the GPU card upgrade with additional slot fan for additional cooling back in 2009.

Even with an SSD, the CPU is still the weakest link.

Photoshop CS4 may respond better to disc-related tasks with an SSD, but any CPU related tasks are still going to be sluggish.

Other than the TenFourFox web browser, no other very recent web browser support.

I used Adobe CS3 on my G4 and it was just OK on OS X 10.5 Leopard.

It didn't struggle too bad, but it did struggle.

Adobe CS3 AND CS4 absolutely fly on my much newer 2009 iMac with more than double the CPU, double the VRAM and with 16 GBs of RAM.

I would think twice about installing an SSD into a nearly 15 year old Power Mac.

Maybe it's time for a much newer, used Mac.

I know this is over a two year old post.

Any iMac 2008 or early 2009 or newer will run Adobe CS4 far better than it does under your current setup.

The core apps of Adobe CS4 will run up to OS X 10.11 El Capitàn.

Yes to all of that. I love my old Macs as much as the next (slightly crazy) person — I don't own anything more recent than 2012. But I could not stand to try to run anything later than CS2 on a G4 or G5. For $150 or less, on eBay, the OP could get a 2009 iMac with decent specs. I wouldn't put a penny into my elderly Macs of the G3 through G5 vintage, with the idea that it would make them viable for any sort of graphics work.

For me in example, my PowerMac intended for Server use: LDAP with RADIUS and for some old games. 🙂 Of course newer software requires newest hardware. For main heavy purposes i have a Mac Pro 2008 with upgrades that can do anything.

But, i so love my Power Mac G4, so i don't want to broke away him, just like that. For me it is as a server is good enough to hold newest RADIUS and LDAP for WiFi Access.

Whew, not sure what yo can do on your budget, there used to be PCI SATA cards for the G4s, but impossible to find unless you're patient.

Most the other things are dependent on which graphic card you have.

See japamacs page here on the best AGP cards for G4s & G5s...

http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Blog/4B4B7BA2-7ABB-47F1-87AC-B03D379 42BEE.html

Rated slowest on top, fastest on bottom.

Is your RAM maxed out? You can use up to 2GB. The vendor I use has G4 RAM (PC2700) for about US$11.50 per 512MB module.

Well, for a PPC Mac...

http://www.macofalltrades.com/Power-Mac-1x-2-3GHz-DC-G5-Late-2005-p/pm-g523-dc-l 05a.htm

It'd need more RAM, can hold 16 GB.

https://www.powermax.com/product/pow-t51040

https://www.powermax.com/product/pow-t51040

Possibly a cheap Intel Mac, your stuff would work on Intel chips or Rosetta...

http://www.macofalltrades.com/Mac-Pro-2x-2-66GHz-DC-Xeon-Early-2006-p/mp-266-4c- e06a.htm

Doesn't sound silly as I still use my G4 MDD regularly. My company bought it for me in 2003 and I used it until I retired in 2007 when they nicely gave me all the Mac equipment in my office. At home it was my "go-to" workhorse until 2011 when the #1 position was usurped by my quad-core i7 iMac.

The G4 is now up in a spare bedroom where it is still running Adobe CS2 fast and sharing files with our newer Macs, It is the last of the OS9-bootable G4s and is actual set up for triple-boot: OS9; OS 10.4.11; and OS 10.5.8. It has two 250GB drives and 1.75GB RAM.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technologies/TSATA/

this is plenty faster than the stock ATA100 IDE interface built into the G4. I just put one into my MDD, it is almost as fast as the ATA133 RAID0 that I have been using in there:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ACARD-AEC-6880M-True-Hardware-RAID-Ultra-ATA-133-Adapter -for-Mac-/261286212872

for simplicity sake, the striped hardware RAID-0 is not really worth the effort for the slight performance benchmark bump you get, compared to the SATA-PCI card itself. If one drive in a RAID fails you lose everything, so regular backups are important. Also, with heat being an issue in the G4, having 2 drives internally doesn't help much. Routing the ribbon cables inside the MDD is a challenge also. I got the PCI - SATA card with the plan to migrate to that and remove the ATA133 RAID0 card and drives. (but I have to replace the power supply first...bummer.)

Photoshop CS4 is never going to be anything but sluggish on that machine, no matter what you do with the graphics card. InDesign might be a bit better, but I haven't tried it. I had Photoshop CS4 running on a pretty decent G5 for a while, and found it painful to use. CS2 is very functional and a much better fit for your MDD.

You may be able to find a Radeon 9600 Pro on eBay or through the LEM Swap list.

An SATA card might help some, and lots of HD space will help, too, but not enough to make CS4 happy.

You love your MDD: I can sympathize, because I still have my 2002 MDD 867 and fire it up once in a while to deal with really old files. But your budget of $200 would be much better spent to get a first-generation Mac Pro. For close to that amount, you could get one with a decent amount of RAM already in it, and run Tiger through Lion on it. And you wouldn't be fighting a losing battle trying to coax marginally acceptable performance out of the trusty MDD.