Upgrade Heaven

Words by Bill Troop
April 2005

There are few things more satisfying than to plug an upgrade processor card into your Mac and see it fly three to ten times faster than it was already going.
One reason we love Macs is that the machines last forever and can be substantially upgraded at comparatively little cost. Why upgrade? It is simple: more speed for less money, and the satisfaction of keeping a great machine functioning. In addition, because upgraded Macs are always less expensive than new ones of equivalent performance, it is a great way to bring new users into the Mac fold who might not be able to afford the latest G5.

There are also two important user categories who are virtually forced into upgrading: high-end audio users who have thousands of dollars invested in specialized PCI cards that work fine in their G4s under their current OS but are useless in new G5s under OS X; and desktop publishing users who have highly optimized systems that require booting into OS 9. They cannot change their systems, but they would like more speed. Upgrading is the way.

Finally, there are just plain folks who love their faithful Macs but want to move into the present and cannot spend lavishly to get there. This includes everyone from kids in school to retirees too prudent to throw away a perfectly good machine.

Interestingly, though many high-end users upgrade in order to stay with OS 9, many ordinary users upgrade so they can move to OS X.

Almost any Mac can be upgraded, but the Macs now considered worth upgrading are anything built after about 1995 (i.e. anything with a PowerPC 604 or later and a PCI bus, including most clones) and on up until just the last year or so.

In this review we are going to focus on two older Macs: a vintage 1997 Powermac 9600 and a G4 dual processor 450 made in 2000 - a fast and sturdy machine which does a great job with OS X, but is not fast enough to run today's most demanding applications, such as Final Cut Pro/Express, DVD Studio Pro, Motion and iLife.Daystar Technology

We are going to focus on processor upgrades from Daystar Technology (www.daystar-technology.com), the oldest of all the upgrade companies and a mine of excellent engineering for many years. Daystar has been working closely with Apple since the late 1980s when it made the first processor upgrades for the Mac. In the 1990s Daystar produced the world's only quad processor Mac, the Genesis MP, which was widely used in video production, outperforming Silicon Graphics and other “supercomputer” systems for a fraction of the price.
Upgrade companies come and go, but Daystar has survived it all with solid design and manufacturing. We have had more than a decade of experience with Daystar products and know firsthand their commitment to customer satisfaction.

The Upgrade Cards
For the 9600, we chose Daystar's XLR8 450 MAChCarrier G4, which upgrades the native 604e to a 450 MHz G4. This well-established design works in dozens of different Macs and older Mac clones. Current pricing is under $200, a small amount for a card that boosts performance a dramatic 10x.

For the G4, we will triple the performance of our dual 450 MHz G4 with a Dual 1.4 GHz upgrade, using the new G-Celerator M5D card from Giga Designs (www.gigadesigns.com), which Daystar bundles and ships with its XLR8 MAChSpeed Control software. MAChSpeed delivers additional speed, testing and CPU/Cache monitoring. Daystar considers the G-Celerator by far the best of the extreme-performance dual processor upgrades.

That is all there is to it. You now have a functional G4 machine that runs OS 9 extremely snappily and will perform more than adequately with OS X. This system runs about 10 times faster than with the original 604 card. One caveat: if you choose to install OS X on this kind of unsupported system, you will require some additional open source (free) software. The simplest thing on a pre-G3 era Mac is to enjoy your upgraded OS 9. Blue and White G3s are now selling used for as little as under $200, and with a G4 upgrade, make a trouble-free beginning platform for OS X.

The Giga Designs G-Celerator
The 1.4 GHz dual processor G-Celerator (about $600, and $300 for a single-processor upgrade) is a little more involved to install. We are chronically inept with equipment and it only took us 15 minutes, requiring no tool other than a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers. With the 1.4 MHz upgrade installed, our G4 boots up faster, switches apps faster, and now renders video three times faster. This massive savings in time more than justifies the price of the processor. The beauty of the G-Celerator dual processor upgrades is that they can even be used on most single processor G4 Macs. Although Giga Designs is one of the newest companies, its technology is fueled by the most experienced Mac engineers in the business. We are glad they have arrived.

Upgrading Along With The Processor
A well-thought-out upgrade plan will encompass not just the processor, but also new video cards and memory. Many excellent video cards suitable for Mac upgrading are available from ATI and nVidia. Unfortunately, the Mac strategy of both companies appears, to this reporter, to be in scandalous disarray. We could not get a straight answer from either company as to what products they had available, where they could be bought, what Macs they worked with, or anything else. Nor could they supply us with any boards to test.

That leaves us with room to discuss RAM, the other most important upgrade you can make.

Memory for Macs is a number-one problem issue. The majority of weird problems with Macs can be traced to substandard memory. The problem is most memory today is substandard as far as Macs are concerned. Macs are much fussier than PCs with their memory. To give just one example: when we upgraded the dual 450 to 1.4 MHz, sleep mode didn't work. We could solve it by moving the processor speed to 1.2 MHz — not a big sacrifice. But we wondered if our memory could be the problem? And it was. Two new sticks of RAM from a trusted vendor and we could run at 1.4 GHz again.

Our trusted Mac memory vendor (also sold by Daystar) is RamDirect (www.ramdirect.com). This wholesale and retail Mac-only Memory house started in 1983 and has the substantial expertise that only 21 years of experience dealing with Mac memory issues can bring. RamDirect knows how to customize Mac memory boards with special EEPROM programming and to add additional resistors and capacitors for maximum noise suppression. RamDirect does not sell memory for the lowest price you can find on the Internet. But it is not an expensive gouger either. Its prices are often only about 10 or 20% higher than its lowest-ball competitors. We believe that paying a few dollars extra for the kind of high quality RAM that RamDirect makes is one of the best investments you can make in your Mac. RamDirect has saved our necks on numerous occasions.

What other machines can you upgrade?
Daystar makes well-established cards to upgrade a wide variety of systems from PowerMac 7300s to AGP-class G4 machines, to Lombard and Pismo PowerBooks. Working with Giga Designs, Daystar offers single and dual processor upgrades of nearly every G4 Apple has made, including the Cube and the iMacs.

Summary
We have been upgrading our older Macs for a decade. Our experiences with Daystar have been consistently successful. Apple's new G5s are the best, most lavishly engineered microcomputers ever made. But there is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing a much-loved old Mac get a new lease on life.

Buy it now!