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manitoubalck

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2003
815
0
Adelaide, Australia
My Question is “can the current lineup of macs be updated/upgraded by any normal consumer products aside form the RAM?”

Almost all PCI expansion cards sold today are of the ageing 33MHz standard, even so it is the “status quo” and hence is what the overwhelming majority of the desktop computing world uses them. In fact it’s challenging to find and extended PCI card.

Standard 33MHz PCI cards wont fit in the 64-MHz or 133-MHz PCI-X slots, in addition to that extended PCI slots run different voltages.
This means that if an owner wishes to add extra USB2, Firewire, sound card, or a TV card etc; they in most cases, cannot.

None of the current lineup of Macs has the ability to add a second optical drive (5¼”), or a 3½” removable disk drive. This angers me because external drives are expensive and traditionally slower than internal drives.
And in the case of the “I” and “E” macs the graphics card cannot be upgraded with out a great deal of pain. However it is good to see that they have moved away from the hopeless GeForce4MX to the not so hopeless heat generating GeForceFX5200. (I am interested to see how they solve the cooling issues in counted on the PC models)

I also found it interesting that apple changed the side of the case on which the motherboard is mounted. This is not criticism; just interesting that apple chose to move away from the traditional (ATX) right hand mounting found in all the tower G4’s, and desktop PC’s.

I am impressed by the New PowerPC 970 powered macs but like many others I sit on the fence between the promising and earlier released (April03) AMD-64, which has now been released in a 2GHz model, and the next revision of the Power mac G5. For me to move to mac the expandability issues must be solved”

check ou the attchment to compare the extended and standard PCI slots
 
Re: Mac expandability issues

Originally posted by manitoubalck
...

None of the current lineup of Macs has the ability to add a second optical drive (5¼”), or a 3½” removable disk drive. This angers me because external drives are expensive and traditionally slower than internal drives.

...
So you are saying that a FW800 drive would be slower than a second optical drive in a MDD PowerMac G4?

Are you sure?

Look at www.barefeats.com and you'll see this...

f35-rr.gif


where FW800 compare favorably to other common connections.

Now the only problem is, everything on the MDD PowerMac is SLOWER than the ATA-133 that was tested.

In fact the first/second optical drive on the MDD are ATA-33.

And the four HDs are on ATA-66 and ATA-100.

---

Though the Optical drive on the G5 is on it's own ATA-100 bus.
 
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