Apple Power Macintosh G4

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General Technical Information

HOSTNAME MAXIMILLIAN
SYSTEM CPU PowerPC 7400, G4 @500 MHz
CACHE (2nd, 1st D/I)
 1 MB, 32 KB / 32 KB
RAM  1024 MB, using 4 x standard non-ECC PC100 or PC133 DIMMs (only PC100 speed supported, max. 2 GB)
DATA BUS WIDTH
 		32 bit
IDE BUS 2 x ATA-66 for DVD drive, ZIP and disks
EXPANSION PORTS 1 x AGP 2x
3 x 64 bit PCI
2 x FW400
2 x USB 1.1
GRAPHICS ATI Rage 128 Pro 16 MB video RAM, Mac Edition AGP card
HARD DISK DRIVES 40 GB ATA disk
27 GB ATA disk (original system disk)
DVD-ROM DRIVE DVD-RAM writer
NETWORK 100 Mbps ethernet onboard
AUDIO
 Onboard soundcard, built in speaker
OS Mac OS 9.2.2
Mac OS X 10.3.9 "Panther"
Mac OS X 10.4.11 "Tiger"
YEAR 2000
SPEED (not measured) VAX MIPS
POWER CONSUMPTION (MAX. / MEASURED)
 237 / 57 - 75 W (depending on CPU load)
COMMENTS The G4 Power Mac's enclosure has an interesting design, you can open/close it quickly & easily by a "pull-a-handle / click-to-close" mechanism. This is quite unique for Macs, normally you cannot open any peecees or UNIX workstations this easily.
PRICE '00 (base system, 256MB RAM, 27 GB disk)
 $3,499

History and other comments

In the summer of 2009 I picked up this computer from a local Finnish company, as this was going to be scrapped. It is interesting that is was used for such a long time, a Mac typically has longer expected useable life time, compared to a contemporary peecee. It was used for approx. 9 years, during which time the operating system, RAM and disks had been upgraded.

You can prolong the life time on most workstations by adding disks and RAM, however, in the 'Wintel' world you are used to the fact that your old peecee cannot be used once you want to use the latest new OS release available. On Macs, the situation may be a little different, usually you can still run one version above the one that the system came with or maybe even the one after that. For this you would need more RAM but this is not really a problem when the price of RAM has been dropping lately.

I think it's pushing it to run Leopard on this type of machine, even with full RAM. So I settled with installing Tiger, which runs quite OK. The only major drawback with this aged Mac + Tiger is that the original graphics doesn't support hardware acceleration for Core Image or Quartz Extreme. I believe that this is the main reason for choppy videos etc. With better AGP graphics, this would make the desktop feel faster, I believe.

A tricky thing about older Power Macs is that normally you need AGP cards that are special 'Mac Edition' ones. You cannot expect to pick up any old AGP card from your pile of peecee junk and plug it in to your Mac and expect everything to work out-of-a-box (sorry!). Also, normally, you cannot use an AGP card from a G5 Power Mac, because these are AGP 8x cards that don't fit in the AGP 2x slot.

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Last updated:  31-5-2009