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CaptainPinko
09-10-2003, 05:53 PM
i was wondering how upgradable is mac hardware? if i get --for argument's sake-- a 1.2 ghz g5 can i later take it to a shop and then fet them to throw a 1.6 in? dual 2 ghz? i know mac is pretty closed but could i upgrade incrementally or do i just have to stockpile a horde of cash?
Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379
09-10-2003, 09:04 PM
Well, you could upgrade incrementally using a pile of cash.

Since about the 7500/7600/8x00/9x00 series, they started to make their machines more easily upgradeable. I don't know how easy it is to upgrade the newest systems, but I know that it is very easy to find and add new memory and faster processors to older PowerPC chipped, PCI machines and G3/G4 equipped towers. There's actually a pretty big market out there for that type of hardware.

The thing is, a 200mhz PowerPC 604 Powermac 9600 is still a very useful machine in the world of graphics editing or music production. So, parts to upgrade those machines are still at a premium. Now that they've started using industry-standard memory, it's gotten cheaper, but the prices on processors are still pretty high. I mean, you could easily pay $400 for a 500mhz G3 processor to upgrade an OldWorld PCI based Mac...
CaptainPinko
09-11-2003, 10:07 PM
so... possible but infeasible?
Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379
09-12-2003, 12:53 AM
No... possible, feasable, possibly expensive.

If you check out eBay and other sites, you can find accelerators for many Macs. Memory's fairly cheap, and some Macs even use old EDO RAM, and some even use standard SDRAM and DDR RAM. It would really depend on what you were looking for.

Small, used 50-pin SCSI hard drives are cheap. ATA drives are cheap. If you have a PCI-based Mac, you could certainly get an IDE controller card and add IDE drives to your machine. I mean, it's perfectly doable. But, it would get to a point that the money you've sunken into turning a PowerMac 8500, 120mhz, 32MB RAM, 2GB hard drive into a machine with a 400mhz G3, 512MB RAM, and an 80GB ATA hard drive for storage, you could have just bought a screamer of an x86 machine.

(By the way, I'd reckon that the 400mhz G3 might run as fast as a 600mhz P3, maybe. I've not done any benchmarks, but I'd imagine that's about what you'd come up with.)