Pimped My Mac

Here's some advice for folks wanting to upgrade their G5 desktops while waiting around for Apple to announce their tasty Intel desktop machines.

First, here's my original spec: PowerMac G5 DP 1.8 GHz, 1.25 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce FX5200 64 MB RAM. (My G5 is the June 2004 revision)

The dual processors gave me some solid multitasking performance, so I set my sights upon my two main bottlenecks: the RAM, which would cause some tasty sluggishness when it was time to swap, and the video card, which was pitifully underequipped to handle Second Life or most anything else 3D on my machine

ATI Radeon X800 for Mac -- $402

X800 is a phatty card, especially if you're using my revision of G5, which is unable to accept PCI Express cards. Going from 64 to 256 MB of VRAM made a big difference. I can now run SL at 1280x1024 with detail sliders maxed -- compared to a very sluggish performance at 800x600 before.. Even got ripple water going on! In all, SL is a vastly silkier experience with this card.

Next, it was time to give myself the freedom to run as many apps as once as I could ever want.

PQI 2GB (1GBx2) RAM Kit -- 176.44

Scored this kit from Newegg. The price is a good $60 less than what Crucial was offering and Belaya vouched for the quality of the PQI hardware. So far, it's been fantastic. I now have 3 GB of RAM installed and the sense of freedom is enormous. No longer do I have to police all of my apps and check Activity Monitor for the amount of free RAM I have available. I just run what I want usually have several hundred MB to spare. Priceless for juggling Second Life, Photoshop, After Effects and other sundry apps at once.

So, in summary, it'll cost you about $650 to throw a big longevity boost at your G5, but from where I'm standing, it's well worth it. Performance is vastly improved from what I'm used to and it'll keep my Mac kicking for a good long time. In another year, it'll be time to score an Intel desktop, but in the meantime, my machine tears through the tasks I need it for.

Hope this is helpful to would-be upgraders out there.