Recently I told you of the sad passing of my son’s Gigabit Ethernet G4 Power Mac and last week we decanted its replacement. Today, I’ll take a closer look at the Dual G4 also known as the Mirror Door Drive.
I’m doing this post on the new-to-us G4 along with all of the photo editing in Photoshop CS2 to give it a bit of a work out. The operating system is Leopard which is the end of the line for Apple’s PowerPC computers.
The machine came with 512 MB of RAM. Fortunately, I had a couple of chips that fit the machine lying around so now it’s 1.5 GB. It maxes out at 2 GB.
PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet with Augmentations
These G4 towers left room for augmentation and improvements so that’s what I had done to my son’s old machine. I added RAM, a new optical drive, a flashed AGP video card with 128 MB of video RAM, a Tempo Serial ATA PCI card, SATA hard drives and, most importantly, a 1.6 GHz processor upgrade. Ultimately, I don’t know if it was all too much for the G4’s ticker because the power supply ended up going South after 4 solid years of daily use.
The SATA card along with the SATA and IDE drives went into the Dual G4. The processor upgrade is only a single processor and will go into some other single processor G4 down the road. I didn’t swap out the video card although I may. The Dual G4 came with a DVI port and Apple’s dreaded proprietary ADC port. I’m running a VGA display through the DVI port with an adapter. I’m sticking with the stock optical drive for now. For an 11 year old, it’s fine!
I’m not crazy about how the SATA cables are running along the logic board It worked out a little better in the old G4. This made me nervous closing the side of the machine.
This line of G4s ended up with the moniker of wind tunnel. The fans on this are loud, but, as I said, it’s a kid’s computer, and he’s not complaining.
I like it. If it was my only computer, it wouldn’t be bad. It runs the Adobe CS2 Suite fine being it was the machine CS2 was made to run on. I’ll have to really give it a torture test one day with one of my multi-layered Photoshop files or something of that nature.
Slightly Scarred but Otherwise Perfectly OK
For a little over $100, I think I got a bargain.
