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Fri, 26 Sep 2003
New Life for an old Mac
My G4/500 AGP was starting to feel old & slow, so I was faced with the choice of buying a new machine or upgrading this one. Here's what I decided to do.
Since my G4 Minitower already had 768M of RAM, two internal hard drives, and a Radeon 9000 it's still a fairly nice machine. However, it was extremely slow with only a 500 MHz CPU and the DVD-RAM drive wasn't too useful since it wasn't able to burn CDs or regular DVDs. My old 80G drive died a few months ago, so I was using a slower 45G drive.
I decided to buy an OWC Mercury Extreme 1GHz CPU upgrade and a Pioneer DVR-105 Superdrive. For a total of $525 I was able to double my CPU speed and gain CD & DVD burning capability. I also added a 7200 RPM Western Digital 80G drive.
It took about an hour to replace the CPU & drive. When I put the machine back together, I was greeted with a startup chime. System profiler confirmed that my system is now running at 1 GHz, and iDVD recognized the new drive as a SuperDrive.
My system's overall XBench score went from 58.42 to 95.20. The CPU score went from 56.35 to 118.37.
Before:
- GCD Loop 47.04 1.84 Mops/sec
- Floating Point Basic 66.41 240.17 Mflop/sec
- AltiVec Basic 40.83 1.19 Gflop/sec
- vecLib FFT 57.02 885.13 Mflop/sec
- Floating Point Library 96.27 3.85 Mops/sec
After:
- GCD Loop 107.55 4.20 Mops/sec
- Floating Point Basic 121.02 437.64 Mflop/sec
- AltiVec Basic 122.54 3.56 Gflop/sec
- vecLib FFT 122.10 1.90 Gflop/sec
- Floating Point Library 120.07 4.81 Mops/sec
The only downside of the OWC Mercury Extreme is the noisy CPU fan, which also makes my G4 AGP minitower sound like a new G4.
For more information about OWC upgrades & installation instructions, visit http://eshop.macsales.com/. I've posted a photo gallery of the upgrade here.