This machine had a single 533 MHz CPU it was upgraded with the aforementioned Giga Design dual 1.8 GHz card for a massive performance boost. The Digital Audio (DA) was a donation, as was a bunch of RAM, some of which was 133 MHz and installed in the DA and some was 100 MHz and ended up in the Mystic. Not that I have a fourth G4 Power Mac as a backup….) It’s running Leopard and MAMP, and it will eventually host, (currently inactive), and perhaps a few other low traffic domains as well.* (I like to use external drives so in case of a computer failure, migrating to another machine is fast and easy. The Mystic is our testbed server with 1.25 GB of RAM, a USB 2.0/FireWire 400 card, an internal 80 GB hard drive, and an external 240 GB drive. It worked, and it now runs very reliably at 500 MHz. Bob Nunn of Operator Headgap Systems has had a lot of luck speed bumping 450 MHz CPUs, and he was willing to try it on my dual processor card. The Mystic was my second dual processor G4, and it originally ran at 450 MHz. (I’ve heard that the 1.42 GHz CPU from the final generation will work in my dual-boot MDD – the one that can boot Mac OS 9.2.2 – but haven’t pursued it.) Because it uses a 167 MHz system bus that was only used in some of the last two generations of G4 Power Macs, upgrades are rare and expensive. The MDD was my main machine for about three years, and I was frustrated by the cost of CPU upgrades. (I removed the second to improve airflow, as this machine was getting hot.) I currently have 2 GB of RAM, a USB 2.0 card, and two hard drives (400 GB and 80 GB, both 7200 rpm), and at one point I had two SuperDrives in it as well. The MDD was my first, and with its dual 1 GHz processors, it was a step up from a 1.25 GHz G4 eMac from 2004. But here at Low End Mac headquarters, we are blessed by an abundance of older Macs – including three G4 Power Macs: a dual 500 MHz Mystic from 2000, a dual 1 GHz Mirrored Drive Doors (MDD) from 2002, and a Digital Audio (DA) from 2001 upgraded with a dual 1.8 GHz Giga Design CPU upgrade (I can only get it to run as high as 1.6 GHz, but that’s plenty of power). Three G4 Power Macsįor those who only own one Mac, that would be the case. I’ve been briefly covering these goings-on in my blog, but now that the process is finished, I have the time to share the whole story. “Wouldn’t that involve a lot of rebooting?” In fact, I will continue using it, but I will be doing the bulk of my work in Leopard. It also means that I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger all this time. Leopard, not Snow Leopard – since none of my Macs are Intel-based, Mac OS X 10.6 isn’t even an option. Monday, Septemmarked my migration to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Yes, you read that right.
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