Old Dog, New Tricks

With Apple dragging their feet on G5 upgrades (where’s my “3 GHz in a year?”), I shoved some old life into my dusty 4-year-old Mac via a processor upgrade.

Out came the G4 500MHz Dual Processors, and in went a 1.2 GHz DP card from PowerLogix. Surprisingly, the upgrade wasn’t as hard as I thought, although getting the screws in through the heatsink proved a bit of a challenge. For all you PC weenies, these are RISC chips so 1.2 is more than enough for now. (RISC being “reduced instruction set,” meaning less instructions per cycle — thus faster.)

PowerLogix has had some rough patches lately, many of these upgrades suffered from bad chips, or just didn’t work at all, and apparently PowerLogix’s return policy is long and tedious. So caveat emptor.

Overall, I’m quite thrilled though. It’s been humming along for days now with no glitches.

For all you geeks out there, I’ve about gone as far as I can with this machine: 1.5 GB memory, 500 GB disk space, Radeon 9800.

Next step will be a G5, when they’re finally upgraded. Then this machine will enter the world of serverdom, replacing my creeky Blue & White G3.