I just noticed that NewerTech has come out with dual GHz upgrade processors that would fit in my old G4. They have a Dual 1.6GHz card for $450. I currently have a G4 Dual 450 with 1.5GB RAM running 10.3.9, and I’ve been toying with the idea of a new MacPro, but the $2500 entry fee is scaring me off. iMacs and Minis are a no go as I have PCI boards I need to use (or upgrade) to run a SCSI scanner and a second monitor. I’m planning on upgrading to Tiger and CS3 soon (I run a small paper RPG business on the side so I do lots of layout work, ilustration, Photoshop, and Painter work) and i was guessing that stuff may start to tax the old dual 450 processor. Oh, I also have a new MacBook that my wife and I share (though its mainly her machine).

So any advice, on what to do? $450 for the upgrade is still a good chunk of change, but I feel like for 20% of the price of a new machine I’ll get a much faster Mac without worrying about whether all of my PCI cards and old peripherals will work. Or should I just save money and get with the latest generation Mac sometime soon.

Thanks for any advice.

Hi Flip,

I feel your pain. For a start the PCI card won’t transfer to the MacPro as it uses the newer PCI Express expansion slots. You may need to consider a new scanner and retire the SCSI one, as an option. As for the extra monitor, If both are VGA, the Mac Pro comes with one DVI/VGA adapter, has two DVI inputs, so all you would need is an extra DVI/VGA adapter.

You could downgrade the MacPro HD and processor (2.Ghz x4) to save a few hundred dollars put you would have to spend again that money for RAM ( I recommend an extra 2GB on top of the 1GB to make it three). The RAM has come down quite a bit since before Christmas. I paid about Ђ400 for 2GB and the same amount now costs Ђ196. 

In all you are looking at anything from $2500—$3000 to replace what you have as a system and you are budgeting for CS3 as well. FWIW I went through the same frustration you are going through now when I brought my MacPro:

“Why don’t Apple introduce a mini tower Intel (single dual core) desktop that doesn’t use laptop parts (iMac /mac mini) and is expandable.”

My saviour were resources that came from a special saving scheme that the Finna Fбil Government here in Ireland introduced 6 year ago so that we would think they were great fellows all together and vote them back in next week. Those suckers were giving us Ђ1 for every Ђ4 we saved. Though we may be the red faced suckers next Friday week when they count the vote and win again. : ( 

There you go. Some news from the outside world.

Back on topic.  If you only have the Ђ450,  the 1.6Ghz upgrade may be a good idea. From my experience using many Macs, OS X really only come into its own when the processor runs faster than 1Ghz. I am not sure how dualie 450s match up. My older Power Mac (dual mirror door single 1.25Gz and 1.25GB RAM) runs really well! though with CS3 and if you are a real power user with big files you may need to seek other opinions on that. Maybe skipping CS3 is an option. Do you need any of the Photoshop features? I still use PS7 and see no need for the newer versions.

Bottom line. If you can wait and save or get loan the Mac Pro is worth it. The standard 2.66 Ghz model is the best value. And maybe waiting for one with Leopard Mac OS X 10.5 would be a good idea as well.

Re: Upgrade or New MacPro?

[quote author=“FlipFriddle”]iMacs and Minis are a no go as I have PCI boards I need to use (or upgrade) to run a SCSI scanner and a second monitor.

Is this some kind of really expensive film-scanner or something that cost hundreds of dollars?

If not, here’s my suggestion:

Buy a new USB scanner and an iMac. That’s it, you’re good to go.

Get the 20” iMac. Upgrade the RAM to 2 GB and the video card to 256 MB. Now you’re at $1,749. (Or $1,949 if you want that 500 GB drive.) Does that leave enough cash for a new scanner?

(If it doesn’t, there’s some good deals in Apple’s refurbished section right now. My suggestion for a good money-saver is the iMac for $1,199. Get that and then buy 2 GB of RAM from Crucial.com for $88. That would get you a very nice machine for $1,287!)

The video adapter is $19 for either DVI or VGA monitors which allows a dual-monitor setup. (Although the 20” screen is mighty nice…I’d get the computer and try it out before deciding on if you actually need the 2nd monitor or not.)

That’s my suggestion, but it’s just an opinion. What I consider a FACT, however, is that upgrading your G4 is a waste of money. Even with a faster chip you’re still stuck with a slower ATA hard drive, slower bus speed, slower RAM, etc. Either upgrade to something new and great like the iMac or just don’t upgrade at all. You won’t get a good enough difference to justify the price of the upgrade.

Re: Upgrade or New MacPro?

[quote author=“Small White Car”]That’s my suggestion, but it’s just an opinion. What I consider a FACT, however, is that upgrading your G4 is a waste of money. Even with a faster chip you’re still stuck with a slower ATA hard drive, slower bus speed, slower RAM, etc. Either upgrade to something new and great like the iMac or just don’t upgrade at all. You won’t get a good enough difference to justify the price of the upgrade.

I agree with Small White Car. I’d get a 17” SuperDrive iMac or 20” iMac, max out the RAM, and if you’re on a tight budget get one of the previous models or refurbs straight from Apple. Plug in one of your existing monitors, sell the other, and get a new scanner. It’s not worth basing your upgrade decisions on old SCSI devices these days.

If you can’t afford the refurb iMac, wait for the next revision of the Mac mini, max out the RAM, and use the one biggest display you have. I know you want two displays, but if you are trying to work on a budget some sacrifices have to be made. With CS3 it would still be a vast improvement over your existing system.

As has already been suggested, if you can’t afford a new computer I’d just save the money for later. It’s not worth the money to upgrade your existing machine. Consider that with something of that age, it’s entirely possible that your power supply or logic board could die unexpectedly, and the expense of a replacement combined with that processor upgrade would give you a total cost very close to what a refurb Intel-based iMac would cost anyway.

Thanks for the replies.
Wow, I was kind of surprised that everyone thought the upgrade idea was a bad one.
I think I may just hold off, at least until I find out how well CS3 runs on my machine. My Dual 450 is actually faster than the 800 Quicksilver tower I have at work (I don’t know why either), so I’ll give it a shot. I have plenty of hard drive space too. I really need to have two monitors so the Mini idea is out. I like doing my page layout work while viewing spreads so it helps a ton to have the palettes out of the way. The iMac is an interesting option, but I wonder how expandable they tend to be? One of the things I’ve liked about the towers is how easy they are to upgrade over time; they seem to be useful longer than the iMacs I’ve had experience with. Do you think that is still the case?

[quote author=“FlipFriddle”]Thanks for the replies.
Wow, I was kind of surprised that everyone thought the upgrade idea was a bad one.

It used to be that processors changed very quickly but other components of the computer didn’t improve nearly as quicly. Back then, it often made financial sense to swap out last-year’s processor for a new one.

But you’re facing a situation where just about every part of the computer has been changed in some form or another since you bought yours. The change from ATA to SATA alone is huge. Changing the processor used to be a huge part of the puzzle, but now it’s just one small piece. Yes, it will help, but it’s not the massive change that it used to be.

[quote author=“FlipFriddle”]One of the things I’ve liked about the towers is how easy they are to upgrade over time; they seem to be useful longer than the iMacs I’ve had experience with. Do you think that is still the case?

That’s still true, yes. The only thing that YOU can change on the iMac easily is the RAM. You can put up to 3 GB in at a later time. It’s possible to change the hard drive, optical drive, or processor on an iMac, but that’s something you’d have to pay someone else to do. It’s not an easy job for any of those. (And remember, only 1 slot for a hard drive. External drives, however, are very popular these days so maybe it’s not an issue.)

So those are limitations, but you have to consider the type of user you are. You seem to be the kind of user that keeps systems for a long time and gets the most use possible out of them. So what does that mean? Well, when you’re looking to upgrade in 5 years you’ll probably find the same thing is true then as it is now…buying a new system makes more sense than upgrading! So it might not matter much that you can’t upgrade.

My basic point is that I’m not that big a fan of upgrading. My last 3 Macs were all towers which I COULD have upgraded, but as they aged I ended up selling each one* and putting the money towards a new tower. So for me, even having computers that COULD be upgraded, I still chose to replace. But that’s just me. This is all just my opinion. I hope it helps, but remember, it’s just one opinion!

*(Old Macs CAN be sold. Check out E-Bay for machines similar to yours to get an idea on prices. It may not be for that much money, but they DO sell as opposed to old PCs, which are often just trashed.)

To me, expandability is most useful if the computer doesn’t come with something you need from the very beginning—like you need to add a PCI card to give it other capabilities. But if you didn’t need to put any extra cards in your tower at time of purchase, and you don’t need to be able to add 16GB of RAM, and aren’t going to do something super-high-end like run Final Cut Studio 2 (which may require a video card upgrade for some users), then you likely don’t really need a tower.

In my experience people often do these upgrades because they spent a huge amount of money on a high-end tower and yet it didn’t really meet their needs much longer than an iMac would have. They can’t accept that the $2,500 machine they bought just a few years agoshould have been a $1,299 iMac, and that they should be selling it right now to get another $1,299 iMac that by now probably outpaces that tower by a decent margin—and for not much more cost than upgrading the video card and CPU of the existing machine.

I’m one of those people who does push my computer to its limits sometimes, but I still got a MacBook (at half the price of a tower!), maxed out the RAM and plugged in a 24” Dell flat panel and my external hard disks. I have all the capacity I really need and at any time I can just sell the laptop and pay a relatively small difference in price to get the latest model.

I would suggest saving for a mac pro. I picked up a 2ghz mac pro refurbed for 1899.00. If your needs require the ppc chip, then buy a used g5 tower. Either way, you will get better performance.
Randy

Thanks everyone. We are getting new MacPros at work, so maybe I’ll see if I can scam one of the two G5s we will have left over. the rest of our towers are 800MHz Quicksilvers and my G4 dual has always felt faster.