Powermac G4 Dual 867 ghz Upgrading?

[nickwc]

Hi! I'm about to buy a Powermac G4 Dual 867 ghz for $50 and I have a few questions. I definitely need to upgrade the hard drive, can anyone recommend what to get and where for cheap. Also this doesn't have an airport, but I've been looking around and think I found one for pretty cheap. I don't plan on using the "Superdrive" but what would be a recommendation for upgrading the graphics card? I have a bluetooth dongle that I plan on popping in it, so I can use my old wireless mouse and keyboard.

I'm planning on only really using this for internet and word processing. Is there anything else I should look to upgrade? Thanks!

Apple Powermac G4 Dual 867 ghz

• 1.25 Gig Ram

• 4X AGP NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX graphics card with 32 MB of SDRAM

• Internal 18 Gig hd

• Internal 9 Gb hd

• 2X DVD-R/CD-RW "SuperDrive"

• OSX Leopard

 

[brendu]

hey, that should work for your word and internet usage... just max out the ram, throw in a 120GB HDD and newer graphics card ~128mb, and then possibly a new $30 dvd burner and you will be good to go.

Airport is a bit more tricky... if it requires apples older airport card (opposed to the more recent airport extreme), then look into a pci wireless card instead, you want to make sure you can get 54mbps not just the 11mbps the original airport supports...


check out otherworldcomputing.com for some upgrades specific to your machine..

 

[Badger^2]

$50 might be too much.

Spend as little as possible, if not less, upgrading anything on that mac.

Honestly, I would just skip it.

Do you have a drive and video card already laying around?

Adding a video card wont help that old dinosaur go any faster.

Are you sure it needs wireless? thats another $20 too.

For the $150 you are about to drop into it, you could get a newer G4 will all of that for the same money.

FWIW, dont expect to watch anything youtube like on that 867, not enough juice.

 

[seb-opp]

You could try and find a CPU upgrade card

 

[disconap]

$50 is a great price for a dual 867mHz, actually. Especially since the RAM is almost maxed.

You can find HDDs at NewEgg for reasonable rates, but you're probably better off looking on Craigslist. I do agree you shouldn't put too much money into upgrading it as none of the parts you buy will work in a newer machine should you buy one in a year or two, but a decent sized hard drive makes sense since you can just put it in a USB enclosure later.

I wouldn't bother upgrading the graphics card though. Far too costly, and even the worthwhile cards are, again, not that much better than the stock card (at least when compared to the current standard). That said, you can find some good deals on flashed ATI Radeon 9800 Pros or, if you have a PC laying around, you can pay even less for a compatible PC one and flash it yourself. Ebay would be the place for either of those and for several other options as well.

Don't bother buying any ram though. Unless I'm mistaken, the max on that machine is 1.5gb, you won't notice that much of a difference over 1.25gb. Still, if you can get a 512mb cheap enough it could be worth it, just keep in mind that it's not going to make a huge improvement.

 

[disconap]

You could try and find a CPU upgrade card

DEFINITELY not worth the cost. They are going for way more than they're worth these days; in fact, prices haven't dropped much on them since I upgraded mine 3 or 4 years ago, which is just insane when you think about it (what PC processor costs NEAR the same 3-4 years later?)...

 

[nickwc]

Thank you for all of your help!

 

[brendu]

as others have stated, do not upgrade the processor, it will cost you so much you may as well buy a new mini... the graphics card, i would suggest looking on ebay, I got one like I described to you earlier for ~$20 and it actually does improve performace (for things like the new dock) in leopard... (however my powermac I upgraded from an 8mb graphics card to 128, so it was completely necessary at the time)...

good luck with it, and let us know what you end up doing to it... all in all, do not spend more than $100 for everything from here on...

 

[AlexMaximus]

Importan! - SATA is the key !!!!!

Thank you for all of your help!

Important to know:

A big speed increase will bring a new hard drive if you use a new and cheap SATA drive with 7200 rpm. The old ATA had a big bottle neck at the time.

Since older ATA drives are more expensive then the newer and faster SATA drives with big chaches, -go for the new ones! All you need is a cheap SATA controller card. This way you can have three benefits:

1. Faster overall system and faster boot up times.
2. SATA I/II is the current standard, -drives can be transfered in a future system.
3. Bigger cache on the drive, (either 16 or 32MB compared to crappy ATA)

Just go with a cheap seritech sata card and you will be amazed how much faster lepard will work on your G4.