The past two days at work, I have been setting up an old G4 500 MHz Powermac. We need it as a video editing and web compatibility testing box.

Boy, was I envious.

Now it isn’t much faster than my iBook (Late 2001 Dual USB), but I could tell right off that it was peppier than my iBook. Hopefully I can co-op some RAM from the old Dells or something.

Wish I had an iMac or a Powermac or something.

I actually spent the time last night looking at what upgrades were available for the G4 tower (we have two at Sapient and maybe they’ll want to unload one or something). Apparently you can purchase modded ATI 9800 Pro video cards (re-flashed PC boards) off eBay and upgrade the original single processor to a dual G4 1.8 GHz.

From the barefeats benchmarks, it looks pretty good—it holds its own against the later G4 dual-procs. Granted, the example in the above link is a G4 Cube, it would probably be about the same (same bus speed, ram, video, etc.).

The price is a little high—basically sets you back about $900 CAD when it’s all done. At that rate, I could buy myself an iMac G5, but the hardware hacker in me likes the expandability of a real desktop.

Then again, being the tech-geek that I am, I can’t see myself investing in the PowerPC platform when Rev. 2 Intel iMacs are only a year away.

Tai