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MacIntel: Update or Wait
Should you upgrade your old workhorse or junk it for a shiny new one?

The surprise WWDC (Worldwide Developers Comference) announcement sent shock waves through not just the Apple community but throughout the greater technology world: Beginning in 2006, all Macs will ship with Intel processors, replacing the IBM- and Motorola-made Power PC microprocessor line. After a decade and a half of success, the IBM,s Power PC roadmap simply didn't match Apple's plans for future Apple products.

The 2.7-gigahertz, 64-bit G5 processor, currently the fastest chip in the Power PC stable, is certainly no slouch. Current Power Macs, all of which feature dual G5 chips these days, are monstrously fast desktop workstations. Apple,s problem with future Power PC chips is not about performance as much as it is about performance for a given amount of electrical power. At competitive speeds, Power PC chips run hot ~ really hot. In the case of the G5, too hot for use in laptops. With over half of all personal computer sales now going over to the mobile side, Apple has a serious problem keeping their popular PowerBooks competitive with Windows-based laptops. Neither IBM not Motorola offered any solutions in their planned chip offerings for next year or beyond, hence the switch.

From the software perspective, things are not really going to be very dramatic. Apple has been secretly developing Intel versions of Mac OS X right from the beginning over five years ago. Developers can recompile their apps after minor tweaking for the new chip and -- poof! ~ instant compatibility.

The vast majority of Mac diehards and essentially all developers have welcomed the historic change to Intel chips. Macs will become even more price competitive with Windows boxes and run just as fast. It,s a compelling story that has everyone wondering if they should wait for the new ,MacIntel 0/00 machines or buy the new Mac they need today and wait to see how the whole changeover shakes out before they buy again.

Apple will deliver their new machines on their schedule and there,s nothing you or I can do about it. But if you need more Mac right now because there,s creative work to be done that can,t wait a year or more, you have some hard decisions to make.

Crawling Tiger, hit OEn draggin,
To bring this all home to reality, I proposed this article because the two PowerMac G4s (80GB 7200RPM ATA drives, 512MB of RAM) we use to create our four publications were getting too slow to do the job. Specifically, Mac OS X.4 ,Tiger 0/00 was kicking their sorry five year-old behinds so badly it was just sad. Knowing we weren,t the only folks on Earth who were facing this dilemma, I decided to contact some of my favorite companies about upgrading our old Macs to serviceable performance: Other World Computing (macsales.com) for PowerPC processor upgrades, Kingston Technology (kingston.com) for memory chips, Maxtor (maxtor.com) for SATA hard drives, FirmTek (firmtek.com) for SATA host controllers, and ATI (ati.com) for graphics cards. The overarching goal was to add enough life to these geezers to get us through another year, after which we would buy new PowerMac G5s and never look back. Did it pencil out? Read on.

Video: ATI + AGP = AOK
We really only had one option when upgrading our video cards: ATI,s 9000 Pro AGP 4X. These PowerMacs featured a special slot called Advanced Graphics Port, or AGP for short. We popped these in, ran the ATI driver upgrade disk and felt an immediate and quite noticeable improvement in overall system snappiness in our main graphic apps: Quark Xpress 6.5 and Adobe Photoshop CS. For the short money ($150 each) these cards cost, we were very pleased with the instant gratification.

Processor: One chip or two?
OWC offers two lines of PowerMac processor card upgrades: the OWC Mercury Extreme series of single-chip cards and the PowerLogix series of both single- and dual-chip cards. As we were after the highest possible performance available, we checked on the compatibility of our two Macs with the PowerLogix Dual 1.8GHz G4 upgrade ($749). Alas, it only works on our PowerMac G4 Dual 450 that shipped from Apple with two processors, the PowerMac G4 ,Gigabit Ethernet 0/00 model. The slightly older PowerMac G4 400 ,AGP Graphics 0/00 ~ AKA ,Sawtooth 0/00 ~ did not have late-enough firmware to accept the PowerLogix board, so we settled for the next best thing, the OWC Mercury Extreme 1.5GHz G4 ($395).

Installation in both cases could not have been easier. Pop the old CPU daughterboard off and pop in the new one. The older 400MHz machine required no firmware upgrade at all, while the newer dual-450 MHz needed a flash upgrade, which was included in the PowerLogix box. Both took about ten minutes from power down to boot up. Apple System Profiler reported the new chip speeds and cache sizes and that was that. Everything worked perfectly from day one and has continued to do so for the past several weeks of hard, constant use.

Memory: Fill OEer up!
Once we were confident the processor upgrades were stable, we powered down again and installed two gigabytes of RAM in both machines. These Macs have four memory slots each, so we popped the Kingston KTA-G4/512MB SIMMs ($172 each) in and they came right up. We detected an immediate increase in performance and smoothness in both OS 9 and X. There,s nothing like having way more than enough RAM to make a modern operating system happy.

Storage: Take it to the limit
Many computer users underestimate the effect a faster hard drive subsystem will have on their perceived system performance. We selected the fastest compatible hard drive technology, SATA II. It,s even faster than FireWire 800 and is standard issue on the latest PowerMac G5 machines. The burning question was whether it would actually work in these aging computers.

FirmTek offers a respected line of SATA II cards for Macs and PCs, so we ordered a pair of their best card, the SeriTek/1VE2+2 SATA PCI-X Host Adapter ($140 each). This little red PCI card is designed to run full-tilt on G5-class machines in PCI-X mode, or downshift to standard PCI speeds in older Macs like ours. They worked exactly as advertised, with no drivers required.

Maxtor sent us a pair of their top-shelf DiamondMax 10 SATA II drives, the 7200 RPM 300 GB models with 16 MB of cache ($199.95 each). Physical installation in the unused drive ramps in the PowerMacs was a snap, but we discovered these particular Maxtors do not have legacy four-pin power jacks. A quick run to our local computer shop and we had 4-pin to 15-pin SATA power jack adapters for $5 each. Both Macs already had a pair of hard drives in them that we elected to keep going for now, but luckily Apple had provided an additional power cable that we could use.

Bringing the systems up, we hit the first serious annoyance of the whole upgrade process: Mac OS X.4,s Disk Utility had no trouble recognizing, partitioning, and formatting the SATA drives, but OS 9 could only see them but not mount them. We chalk this up to a firmware issue within the controller cards, and since they are field upgradeable via flash updater, we hope to have this little bug squashed eventually. Since we weren,t planning to access our local drives from OS 9, this was not a deal breaker. On the off chance we would need to reboot into OS 9, we would be using the applications on the old drives anyway, accessing all our work files from our production servers. It would have been a more elegant solution if it had just worked with our legacy OS, though.

Once we got over that little snafu, we fired up my favorite hard drive backup/restore utility, the $19.95 SuperDuper (shirt-pocket.com) and cloned our working OS X volumes from the 7200 RPM Western Digital 80GB drives we had been using previously. Once back from lunch, our drives were cloned. Then ensued a little dance that can really perplex you until you realize what is going on inside the box. Once you have cloned your drive, you can,t boot from it unless you disconnect the old drive. If you forget to, it will give you a nasty kernel panic since there are now two identical volumes contending for control over your computer during the boot process. But that,s not the end of it. You have to name your clones drive the same as your old one or you may experience weird events. I elected to rename the new drive and found that some of my applications were initially confused about where they were. Extensis Suitcase X1 never did figure it out, so I had to trash the suitcase.plist file and rebuild my font library fresh. All the other apps settled down after a launch or two, but if you can I,d recommend sticking with the old name to make things easier on yourself.

A handy trick in OS X is to startup with the Option key held down. This will bring you to a pre-boot panel from which you can select any local volume with a Mac OS on it, 9 or X. This can get you out of unwanted Startup Disk settings so you can set things they way you want them.

How fast is fast enough?
How well do we like our new rigs? We love them. We,ve jumped two, arguably three generations of PowerMac G4 and, with the fast drives and extra of memory, enjoy overall performance almost comparable to the first G5 machines. We can definitely make it a year or more if needed. But was it cost effective compared to just buying a pair of current entry-level PowerMac G5s?

Just barely. The excessive memory and huge hard drives really drove the price up without substantially increasing performance. Half the memory and drive capacity would have served perfectly well for our needs. A new PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz with 1GB of RAM and the stock 160GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive would cost $2099, while one with 2GB of memory and a 250GB SATA drive would total $2424. If we had configured our PowerMac G4 400 with only 1GB memory and the 160GB version of Maxtor,s SATA line, we,d have spent a reasonable $1054.90.

Our ,dualie 0/00 450 machine was a bit more complicated. All non-CPU upgrade costs are the same as the 400, but the PowerLogix 1.8 dual cost $729, adding up to a total of almost two grand ~ within $500 of the price of a brand new, PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz with 1GB of RAM and the 160GB drive! If we selected the more reasonable dual 1.2GHz PowerLogix upgrade with 1GB of memory and the 160GB Maxtor drive, we end up with a very manageable 1118.90.

For our needs, the piecemeal upgrade path is the way to go. We already have an investment in our Macs and they are sure to last another year or two and probably many more beyond that. Historically, PowerMacs enjoy astonishing longevity. It will also be a lot easier to turn them into servers a year hence than a practically new Dual G5. Our server needs are quite modest so G5 machines would be overkill and a waste of money. Sure, we could eBay them, but that,s yet another hassle distracting us from our core task of making magazines. And there is the whole ecological issue of tossing perfectly good machines into a landfill when they still have plenty of useful life in them, given a little TLC and a short stack of C-notes.

Perhaps best of all will be the extreme satisfaction of moving up to Apple,s blisteringly fast Intel PowerMacs, having squeezed every last bit of usefulness from our trusty old workhorses. In 2005, we,ll run like the wind. In 2006, we,ll fly.

So how fast is fast enough?
PowerMac G4 400 AGP:
Over The Top Upgrade

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