Upgrading Your Mac

Posted by John P on October 7th, 2006 2 Comments Printer-Friendly

Have an old Mac laying around your house? Want to put some good use to it? Take a look and find out what’s best for you.

Editor’s Note: First off, we’d like to apologize to all of the manufacturers that sent us these products for the delay of this article.

Should I upgrade my old processor to a faster one?
Most definitely, CPU upgrades for older Macs are now hitting speeds up to 2.0GHz, which will make your old Power Mac capable of running the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopardï¿½? operating system. We got our particular upgrade from FastMac and installed it in a Power Mac G4 AGP Graphics or “Sawtoothï¿½? model, and experienced no compatibility issues within our testing period.

Final Verdict: With the latest Macs being powered by Intel processors, you can still get the best performance out of your Mac, without spending too much.

Will upgrading the graphics card give me any extra performance?
Most likely. If you’re a casual Mac user that needs the latest in Quartz Extreme technology (that’s the stuff that powers Dashboard and Expose), then you might need a new graphics card to replace that 8MB ATI Rage card sitting inside.

Final Verdict: The next iteration of OS X, Leopard, will include some pretty hefty graphics, if you think you’re going to upgrade, you might want to consider a new graphics card.

Should I upgrade the ATA controller inside my Mac?
If you don’t know what the heck an ATA controller is, chances are you don’t need one, but basically, it’s the circuit which allows the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive (courtesy: Wikipedia).

Under the tests we did, we found no performance boost from installing a new ATA controller, but upgrading the hard drive could help. See the next question for more deets. If you see the need for a new ATA controller, we tested one from A-CARD which you can buy from Newegg or other fine online retailers.

Final Verdict: Don’t upgrade this unless you have something older than a G4.

Is upgrading the hard drive a good idea?
Yes. Most likely you have a 10 to 40GB hard drive in that old honker of your’s, so we definitely recommend upgrading this to an 80GB or so. Also, cache is a good thing to look at, look for something that has an 8MB or 16MB cache for an extra performance boost. RPM is another thing to check for, we bought ourselves a 7200RPM drive from Western Digital, and everything was much faster.

Final Verdict: It’s a good idea, the latest iLife applications can take up a lot of space in addition to your media.

Bonus Upgrade: If you have a CD-ROM drive still laying in your Mac, chances are it’s time for an upgrade. As most of the stuff today, is shipped or put on DVDs only. FastMac sent us a Pioneer 16x DVD-RW/R Dual Layer drive or as Apple calls it, a “SuperDrive”. Now you have the ability to back up your music, photos, and movies. It’s a great addition for iDVD and iMovie.