Mac Cube + 15" Apple Studio Display

I think you already told us the capacity of the hard drive. If you're asking whether a larger one can be installed, the answer is yes. If you consult System Profiler, I think you'll find that the Cube takes PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. It's got three slots, for maximum of 1.5 Gb of RAM. You've got lots of options for speeding it up. It all depends on how much you want to spend and/or how much effort you want to take on.

It really does depend on how much you want to spend to speed it up. You could even sink in a dual 1.6 processor but that would be the cost of a new mac mini. Mine has an 80 gig hard drive, 1.25 ram, and a superdrive. Very impressive machine considering its age. Make sure to look through cubeowner.com for information on your new mac.

More ram -- you can use 3 sticks of 512mb. Easy install. More difficult would be a new hard drive with 7200 rpm speed. A new video card helps too -- there is an ATI option out there that is fairly cheap and Quartz Extreme compatible. You may find the GeForce 2 as well. GeForce 3 was top of the line for the Cube, and I've seen it on ebay. Whatever you get, make sure you get one with the Apple Display Connector so you can easily use your 15 inch monitor. The next step up would be processor upgrades. I have not done one before so no comment on difficulty. Finally, with new card and hard drive, you may want to put a fan in your Cube. I put in one with a blue LED light in it, and it's quiet and cool looking too.

More ram -- you can use up to 3 sticks of 512mb. Easy install. More difficult would be a new hard drive with 7200 rpm speed. A new video card helps too -- there is an ATI option out there that is fairly cheap and Quartz Extreme compatible. You may find the GeForce 2 as well. GeForce 3 was top of the line for the Cube, and I've seen it on ebay. Whatever you get, make sure you get one with the Apple Display Connector so you can easily use your 15 inch monitor. The next step up would be processor upgrades. I have not done one before so no comment on difficulty. Finally, with new card and hard drive, you may want to put a fan in your Cube. I put in one with a blue LED light in it, and it's quiet and cool looking too.

Check out the Cubeowner.com website for more info.

Installing a new hard drive is relatively easy. It's the first upgrade I did to my Cube -- took probably less than 15 minutes. A CPU upgrade is far more challenging. The core will need to be torn down almost completely. This upgrade took me several hours (and a few scary moments) to complete. All of the CPU upgrades will come with a base fan, which is not difficult to install because the Cube was designed to accommodate one. Thought it can be made to work, the Geforce3 MX card was never intended for the Cube. Several other 32mb video cards will work with little or no modifications. Just make you get one with an ADC connector, since you have an ADC display. Probably the most common are the Geforce2 MX or the Radeon 7500.

Just to clarify what everybody is saying, here is a list of what you can do to it (in the order I would do them):

New Graphics Card (For Quartz Extreme/Core Image)
More RAM
Bigger Hard Drive
SuperDrive
CPU Upgrade