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Power Up That iMac
JimRay writes: "A company called powerlogix has announced that they are offering a G-3 upgrade for those fruity iMacs. For a mere US$500, you can have an iMac running at 500mhz with 1mb of backside cache. Throw linuxPPC on that thing and you're ready to rock and roll. The press release is here
and the specs are here."
For a list of distros, check Apple's Linux page. Of course, NetBSD and OpenBSD are available as well.
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I don't know where you guys get your mac info but it is about the oldest in the world. If I knew the slashdot community was interested in this I would have submitted it a long time ago.
And F.Y.I. there are two vendors of iMac upgrades the other one is Newer Technologies.
Except the way Newer Tech does is buy your old CPU/ROM combo card and replace the CPU.
Powerlogix, My favorite Mac Upgrade company, has figured out how to pull the ROM and place it on the hard drive and then when you install the new CPU it will flash it into the one on their chip. Pretty sweet idea if I do say so myself.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
so, you take out the old, 200 or 233 daughterboard from your imac, and what do you do with it? throw it out? no!
you send it back to powerlogix (and get a refund off your purchase), so they can pop the processor loose and make another 500 mhz daughterboard out of it. i read about this a while ago in the mac media, and the thing that took so long to get started was that powerlogix needed to get a critical density of the older imac boards.
that's the only way they can upgrade the imac's daughterboard without some serious reverse engineering of the apple proprietary boards. pretty smart, if you ask me.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
For $300, you get a 400MHz board with 512k of cache - a much better deal for most. $500 to upgrade an older Rev. A through D iMac isn't such a big whoop, when you're constrained to Rage Pro graphics and a 66 MHz system bus. But for $300 (OK, $299), it's a nice way to kick a little life into the old iMac. I may get one for my wife's iMac, and then set her up with ViaVoice once she has the processor to chew through it properly.
Just to point it out, the current 2.0 iMacs run at 350 and 400 MHz, but with a 100 MHz system bus and the ability to use standard SDRAM DIMMs (not the laptop SO-DIMMs the older ones use). This processor upgrade is only for the older ones.
The one other thing to keep in mind is that Apple is almost a lock to announce new iMacs at Macworld next month, given that the current line dates back to October with no changes since then. At the very least, expect a speed bump in the current models, with possibly more RAM added, and maybe things like a DVD added to the low end model and price cuts as well. Apple makes a lot of profit on iMacs, relative to most low-end systems.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I'm sorry but Powerlogix doesn't do that with the daughter cards, you are thinking of Newer Technologies. They do that with the daughter cards, this post is incorrect. PowerLogix pulls the ROM off the original board and flashes it onto their upgrade board.
CPU upgrades for the iMac have been around for a long time, the one from Powerlogix is actually semi-normal, instead of mailing off your daughter baord to be used in another upgrade.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
Apple will probably (sue them/modify future Imacs so this modification is not possible/otherwise behave in a fashion considered anti-social by the geek culture at large.) Pick one.
Well, if history has its way, none of the above will happen. Powerlogix (and a handfull of other companies) have been making Apple processor upgrades for a rather long time. No sueing, no odd modifications, no underhanded tricks. Is it really odd to think that Apple might actually *want* you to be able to upgrade your computer without buying a new one? Apple offered accelerators like this for quite a while, I'm not entirly sure why they stopped, but they certainly aren't making any moves trying to stop others.
It's not like they're Microsoft.
Over at MacSlash we covered the news last week in this story. We've got some more details, and some good links for more information.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Newer Technologies makes a pretty sweet iMac upgrade, too. Their videotape installation makes it easy to pop in and go, although it's only 466 mhz, as opposed to the 500 discussed in the article above.
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