Slowly, all of that changed: Last summer for my birthday, my parents bought me Geniesoft Score Writer 2, because Cakewalk had ditched Score Writer and it was unstable in Windows XP. That CD was dual-format, both Windows and Mac. Not long after that, I got myself a copy of Propellerhead Reason, and THOSE CD's are also dual-format, Windows and Mac. I started to get the itch, and I just needed some other reason to jump from the Athlon platform. Then I saw it.

I'm a full-time software support rep, working for a company that produces student information software, tracking attendance, grades, schedules, special needs, etc. I was sent to a school that used almost nothing but Macs, aside from the Windows machines that ran our software. When I got there, I saw all the eMacs, running OS X 10.3. When I saw the web-based gradebook software running on the Mac, something in my head clicked; I had to have a Mac. I scoured eBay, and I found the subject of this article.

To fund all of this, I sold a couple of AMD-based systems. I've always hated Intel and had nothing but Athlon systems. Two of them went for a ride in a USPS truck and I started my purchasing:

System Specifications

• PowerMac G4 with AGP graphics
• Motorola G4 400MHz
• AGP Rage 128 Pro w/16MB of onboard memory
• 128MB system RAM
• 6x DVD-ROM
• 10GB hard drive

Putting it all together and Total System Costs
The way I figure it, I could pick up a system and upgrade it to the speed of a newer system and spend less money in the process. I knew when I bought it that in its current state, it wasn't going to be enough to do everything I needed, but I also had recently found www.xlr8yourmac.com and after a lot of careful research and scouring through reader reviews, knew that I could upgrade it for not a lot of money. I already had another 384MB of PC100 RAM that would work very well in the system. Staples had a "special buy" on 120GB Maxtor ATA hard drives for 69.99, so I picked one of them up. I nabbed myself a copy of OS X 10.3 off the Ônet for 49.99 which I also received that same day. Now I just needed to pick out two more upgrades that would really turn this Mac into something special: a CPU upgrade and a new video card.

Reading around xlr8yourmac and checking prices, I settled on a Sonnet Encore 1GHz G4 CPU and a Radeon 8500 AGP version. I paid $70 for the Radeon 8500 and $210 for the Sonnet CPU upgrade.

$325 later and the system was delivered to my door on December 21. Time to get to work upgrading this bad boy. The CPU and Radeon would arrive a few days later, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, right?

Before I even started the system up, I immediately swapped out the 10GB for the shiny, new 120GB. I also dropped in the RAM. I hooked it all up to my 19" KDS monitor, plugged in my Logitech Elite Keyboard, MX310 mouse, Creative Labs Inspire T3000 2.1 speakers, and fired it up. I heard the startup sound for the first time and after a brief encounter with goosebumps (coming from a PC and all, I was expecting a little beep) and popped in my OS X DVD. OS X was a very painless install. The Disk Utility was a very easy-to-use partitioning software and the OS install went very smoothly.

I wish I could say the same for my first-time use of the operating system. The graphic effects move so sloooowwwwlllyyyyy. I was not ready for that at all, considering that a RIVA TNT was sufficient for GUI acceleration in Windows. I started searching the net for information on OS X's GUI acceleration, thinking maybe I needed to install drivers or something (again, since I'm coming from a PC, I'm thinking EVERYTHING needs its own separate drivers). Instead I was greeted by information on Quartz Extreme and discovered that once my Radeon comes, the desktop should be much more snappy.

Digging through the software that came with the Mac, I found my OS 9 install CD, OS X install discs (10.1 with the system and 10.3.5 on DVD), as well as some games, most notably Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. At this point, I decided it was time to install some software and see what this bad boy could do. See the benchmarks section to find out how it went.

Finally on Monday, December 27th, the Radeon 8500 and the Sonnet CPU upgrade arrived on my doorstep. I figured I should take things one at a time, install the video card, test things out, and then install the CPU upgrade. I've been playing inside PC's for years, the hard drive and memory upgrades were easy, so I figured I wouldn't have any trouble with these parts. Since we have all the parts now, let's see what kind of money it takes (and what I spent) to get a reasonably useable Mac system today:

• Power Mac G4 AGP, 400MHz, 128MB of RAM, 10 GB hard drive: $325
• 120GB hard drive (special buy at Staples): 69.99
• 3x 128MB PC100 borged from a Pentium III system: (free) $25 each on eBay = $75
• Radeon 8500 AGP (64MB, Mac edition to get out of having to flash it): $70
• Sonnet Encore/ST G4 1GHz: $219
• OS X Panther DVD: $49
• System with no monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers (all of which leftover from an old, mostly-dead system)
• Total (before tax/shipping): $808.99. I paid $733.99

Considering the storage space, the video card (which is faster than a Radeon 9000 Pro or Radeon 9200 Pro; the RV250/RV280 cores are derived from the R200 core, with half as many texture units per pipeline, therefore half the fillrate), and the amount of memory, I couldn't buy a 1GHz G4 system for the same price. I also picked up a firewire Lacie CD-RW to round out the package.

The 8500 went in just like any other video card upgrade I've ever done, except the operating system recognized it and put it straight to work. Already, I could tell that the GUI's animations were moving much more smoothly. Quartz Extreme was definitely moving and it was enough to make the machine perfect for web surfing or word processing. It also made my self-proclaimed "super high quality mode" in Quake 3 very playable as well.

First hint of trouble, easily scared away
After putting the system through its paces in this configuration, I decided it was time to finally open the Mac for the last time and install the Encore/ST G4 1GHz. Remember where I'm coming from; in the PC world, basically every CPU since the i386, with the exception of the Pentium II, early Celeron CPUs, and the code-named Katmai Pentium III CPUs, all fit into the motherboard in the same manner. You'd remove the heat sink, lift a lever, and the small, square-shaped CPU would lift out of the socket. Imagine my surprise when I opened the box of this G4, and I saw a PCB approximately four times the size of the Athlon 64 in my Windows PC! I was further dumbfounded by the fact that I had to use a screwdriver to be able to remove the processor card. Thankfully, Sonnet's installation instructions were wonderful to follow, and the CPU upgrade popped in pretty quickly. All told, I'd say I took more time putting the machine on my table and experimenting with how to remove the heatsink clips than actually installing the card and putting it back under my desk.

Once I put the machine back under the desk, I fired it up and for a very brief moment, it was like I had a brand new Mac. OS X loaded faster than it had to this point, web pages in Safari seemed to load faster - probably because the machine was rendering them as fast as the data downloaded, instead of my internet connection waiting for the Mac - and it was another leap forward in responsiveness. I fired up Unreal Tournament, and as I was adjusting my settings and about to dive into a game, the system locked up. I hit the reset button and as the machine rebooted, I looked at Sonnet's inset that said to download their cache software if I had problems. I did so, installed it and rebooted again. This time, the desktop greeted me with black bars full of error messages - it was as if a full-screen command line had bled over into the GUI. This time I reached for the power button and shut it down, thinking it was overheated. As it sat to cool off, I opened the side back up and everything SEEMED to be in order, so I put it back together and fired it up a third time. It's been running rock-solid ever since, for three days, as of this writing. I'm not sure what happened, but thankfully everything is A-OK now.

Benchmarking
The rest of the article encompasses performance numbers at various stages of upgrading the Mac. Hold on tight for the benchmarks section. My benchmarking method is very straightforward and easily reproducible: I run each test a grand total of four times, then I throw out the lowest score and average the other three. That tends to eliminate any sort of swapping and virtual memory activity from the scores. We'll start with some straightforward system stress tests.

The math-intensive fractal applications obviously isn't getting anything from the video card, as both results on the 400MHz G4 are pretty equal. The 1GHz G4, on the other hand, is well over the 250% difference you would see if everything were equal. I believe there to be two factors at work:

1. The stock G4 has 1MB of L2 cache that runs at half the CPU speed. The Sonnet CPU has 256k of L2 cache at half speed, but that half speed is 500MHz, rather than 200.
2. The Sonnet G4 has 2MB of L3 cache that runs at a 1:4 divider of the CPU speed. (L3 cache is also DDR IIRC) That's actually 50MHz faster than the 1MB L2 on the stock G4.

Next is the popular (pure benchmark) X Bench. Results for the 400MHz/Radeon 8500 configuration were omitted because the benchmark didn't get along with the configuration for some reason. I'll draw your attention to the OpenGL test and tell you that no, I don't have a clue why the system that was less than half as fast as the upgrades scored higher. (Xbench is just a pure benchmark and it's opengl test is only a spinning squares test) The results could be repeated over and over, however.

Now let's move on to some gaming scores:

In Quake III, it's fair to say that both the video card and the CPU were equally affecting the score, especially at the Max Quality setting. Max Quality, for the record, is the a resolution of 1024x768, the highest texture quality, color and texture depths both set to 32bit, and the highest geometry detail. Quality and Normal are both built-in settings for the game. (to really stress the video card you should also run higher resolutions than 1024x768. See previous graphics card reviews linked on the Video topics page.-Mike)

Nothing could quite get Unreal Tournament going, but that also seems to be a problem with the Windows version as well. I can tell you from playing that the video card had a bit of impact at higher resolutions, as the performance didn't tail off, but the CPU helped the playability of this game by leaps and bounds that are just not well-portrayed by these graphs. The benchmark in question is "benchmark.dem" from 3dcenter.de.

Everyone knows that there are better things to do with your life than play games, so let's look at a few application benchmarks now, shall we?

We'll kick things off with the more professional aspect of OpenGL (as opposed to graphics) with rendering, with Cinebench 2003. The most interesting thing I can think of here to note is that the OpenGL speedup for the 1GHz G4 wasn't as much as with the 400MHz/Radeon 8500 combination. This is most likely because the OpenGL Hardware test employs both the CPU and the video card, and the video card had not changed.

We wrap up our chart excursion with the iTunes MP3 conversion benchmark. Unsurprisingly, the video card had absolutely nothing to do with how fast it imported. In fact, it seems that it's entirely dependant on CPU speed, as the result scaled quite linearly with the MHz.

Photo Gallery
What Frankenmac article would be complete without having the subject pose for a couple of pictures, right? Let's see what we've got.

Original G4 CPU Module

Sonnet G4 Upgrade Module

Above, we have the two CPUs. On the left is the original G4 running at 400MHz. On the right is the Sonnet upgrade card. The white in the center is a thermal conductive goop (geek term), which will help the CPU make better contact with the heat sink. Incidentally, the paste on the G4 ABSOLUTELY does its job, as when I opened it up and touched the aluminum cooler, it was VERY warm to the touch. I'm currently investigating a way to mount a fan or get another cooler with a fan that will both attach to the processor card and allow the system to still close.

Here the Mac sits in my workspace. As I noted earlier, I'm a musician by trade, and here you can see the Yamaha keyboard I'm using for MIDI input. Currently, I'm using a Yamaha UX16 USB MIDI adapter, but after the first of the year it and the onboard sound will be replaced by the M-Audio Audiophile 2496, which is about as good as it gets for a sound card. My PC had a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum with all the nice inputs, but sadly, Creative isn't in the market of developing Mac drivers for it. Incidentally, the monitor is displaying the very Word file this writeup is in, along with the Excel spreadsheet with all of the graphs in it. The test drive for Office 2004 on the Mac was VERY impressive, causing me to run out and buy the Student/Teacher version (thanks to my status as a student). My favorite feature being the Formatting Palette that's sadly missing from my Office 2000 Professional disc

We wrap it up with a final look inside the system. You can see the Radeon 8500, the full RAM slots with the whole 512MB, and the Maxtor hard drive in the back. The only thing you can't see well is the Sonnet upgrade, but you can see some of the purple PCB sticking out from under the heatsink

Conclusions
All in all, I've got to say that this machine, built for not a lot of money at all, is more than enough to do what I'm using it for. It's a music creation station with Propellerhead Reason 2.5 and Geniesoft ScoreWriter 2.6, a word processing/office "productivity" station, and an email/web browsing station.

It even plays the odd game. What I was really surprised and happy to learn was just how many of the games I enjoy are available for the platform, and how many I actually owned. My copies of Diablo II and the LOD expansion, Diablo, Starcraft and the Brood War expansion, Warcraft II Battle.net edition, and Warcraft III and the Frozen Throne expansion are ALL dual-format discs with Mac installers and all of them run wonderfully either under classic (as Diablo and WC2) or natively under OS X (such as basically everything else). It'll be perfect when friends from out-of-town visit for the late-night StarCraft games.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I've enjoyed putting it together. It has been my privelege to work with a Mac and finding just how many Mac-specific resources are out there, such as xlr8yourmac.com. Thank you for giving me your time.
-Ben

Related Articles:
See the Systems page for other articles on mods/case conversion/performance tests, etc. by system type.
The G4 reviews page for full reviews of G4 CPU upgrades including apps tests, game tests and install info.
The IDE/ATA Topics page has articles on upgrading G4 tower hard drives and optical drives.