Processor Upgrade [Mac Systems]

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From: tkntexas on 2 Mar 2006 01:28

I have G4 tower with 500mhz processor. Didn't seem that slow when I
first used it .. but after a week of using my iBook at 1ghz, I felt the
slowness. I am thinking of upgrading the processor. Maybe next year I
will get a new iMac-Intel.

I found a couple websites selling processor upgrades. For costs of a
mac mini I could upgrade to dual processor at 1.8ghz. Any negatives?
Any warnings? Any comments, cares or concerns? Is this installable by
end user? I have added memory, changed harddrives, and done that sort
of thing.

From: Ilgaz Ocal <ilgaz_ocal@yahoo.com on 3 Mar 2006 01:41

On 2006-03-02 08:28:10 +0200, "tkntexas" <tkntexas55(a)aol.com> said:

> I have G4 tower with 500mhz processor. Didn't seem that slow when I
> first used it .. but after a week of using my iBook at 1ghz, I felt the
> slowness. I am thinking of upgrading the processor. Maybe next year I
> will get a new iMac-Intel.
>
> I found a couple websites selling processor upgrades. For costs of a
> mac mini I could upgrade to dual processor at 1.8ghz. Any negatives?
> Any warnings? Any comments, cares or concerns? Is this installable by
> end user? I have added memory, changed harddrives, and done that sort
> of thing.

I think you should check that honest and cool site, they are (in fact,
1 guy!) kind of "specialized" on such answers/support:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

It is also good at "OS X news that matters" too.

Ilgaz

From: Hans Aberg on 3 Mar 2006 14:24

From: aRKay on 8 Mar 2006 22:28

In article <1141280890.156426.198290(a)j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"tkntexas" <tkntexas55(a)aol.com> wrote:

> I have G4 tower with 500mhz processor. Didn't seem that slow when I
> first used it .. but after a week of using my iBook at 1ghz, I felt the
> slowness. I am thinking of upgrading the processor. Maybe next year I
> will get a new iMac-Intel.
>
> I found a couple websites selling processor upgrades. For costs of a
> mac mini I could upgrade to dual processor at 1.8ghz. Any negatives?
> Any warnings? Any comments, cares or concerns? Is this installable by
> end user? I have added memory, changed harddrives, and done that sort
> of thing.

I have a G4-450 AGP that is now a G4-1GHz AGP using a OWC processor card
that was added two years ago. The card saved me from having to buy a
new Mac. It boils down to how you are willing to pay for performance.

From: James Glidewell on 10 Mar 2006 15:47

tkntexas wrote:
> I have G4 tower with 500mhz processor. Didn't seem that slow when I
> first used it .. but after a week of using my iBook at 1ghz, I felt the
> slowness. I am thinking of upgrading the processor. Maybe next year I
> will get a new iMac-Intel.
>
> I found a couple websites selling processor upgrades. For costs of a
> mac mini I could upgrade to dual processor at 1.8ghz. Any negatives?
> Any warnings? Any comments, cares or concerns? Is this installable by
> end user? I have added memory, changed harddrives, and done that sort
> of thing.

I've never done a processor swap on a G4, but it looks pretty easy. Be sure
to upgrade your Mac's firmware to the latest vcersion (4.2.8, I think).

Be aware that there are other bottlenecks which will keep you from seeing
the speedups you might expect (based on the clock speed ratio). I suspect
memory bandwidth is the biggest one.

See:

<http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=Benchmarks/061303/main061303.html>

For FCP rendering (a good test of CPU/Altivec - and at least partly multi-threaded):

<http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Benchmarks/061303/100/fcp100.html>

A single 400 takes 344 seconds, while a single 1.2Ghz takes 162 seconds. A 2.1X
speed-up with a 3X clock ratio. The dualie ratio is slightly worse.

Newer systems (even the G4 Mini) have significantly improved memory subsystems,
so a 1.2Ghz G4 in a Mini is likely quite a bit faster than a 1.2Ghz G4 in your
tower.

My conclusion was that for a single-CPU G4 system, the sweet spot was a 1.2-1.4
Ghz upgrade for a bit over $200. Much beyond that, the law of diminishing
returns gets serious.

OWC(www.macsales.com) and www.dealmac.com are good places to start.

Another low-cost option is to upgrade the stock video card to one that supports
Quartz Extreme (offloading some window management to the GPU). Any Mac AGP
Radeon or Nvidia Geforce 2mx or above with 32MB+ will work, I think. I have two
G4's at home - a 500 with the stock Rage 128 Pro and a 400 with a GF2MX. I
couldn't understand why the 500 felt so much more sluggish than the 400... until
I swapped the graphics cards around. QE not only makes moving between windows
and scrolling snappier, it also takes quite a bit of load off of the CPU,
allowing it to get whatever you wanted to get done a bit quicker.

There are lots of "unofficial" Mac Radeon and NVidia cards out on eBay...

HTH.

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