Processor upgrade for my Mac..

[Alaia]

Hi all!

I´m thinking about upgrading my Power Mac G4 Digital Audio/ 733Mhz with a OWC Mercury Extreme G4/1.4GHz upgrade card (or Sonnet Encore/ZIF...).

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=5860&Item=OWCME41400L2D (\"http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=5860&Item=OWCME41400L2D\")

The guys in my Macstore advised me against doing it :-) what do you think?

Any recommendations or experiences with Mac processor upgrades?

Alaia :-)

[Beel]

Hello Alaia,

well, I´ve to second your Macshop guys. I don´t like CPU upgrades. You have to pay to much for what you get. I´d recommend to save the money and save some more money to get a new Mac. You´ll benefit from the speed of the RAM, the HD, the higher clocked bus etc. more than from just a new CPU.
I know, on the other hand a new Mac costs a lot mor than the upgrade but anyway, I would not do it.

[Nick Batzdorf]

For the sake of argument, let\'s say that your computer is worth $750 on the used market and the upgrade is $600. That\'s $1350. For $1350 you can just about buy last week\'s dual-processor 1.4 Mac, which is a much better use of your $600. Even if the performance were identical and you could be 100% confident that no incompatibilties exist, the upgraded Mac won\'t be worth as much on the used market when you finally do sell it.

Those figures aren\'t exact, but they explain why I\'ve never found it worth upgrading a Mac, going back as far as 1985. The one exception was the $300 I spent to upgrade my G3/400 Pismo Powerbook to a G4/500. That lets the machine run an Altiverb, and it gives the computer just enough power to be useful as an auxiliary machine in my studio.

But Powerbooks are a different story, because I keep them much longer. Plus this upgrade wasn\'t to make the screen go faster or to run two more lousy reverb plug-ins, it was to push the computer over a certain threshold so it would be useful in the studio.

[edmann]

Originally posted by Nick Batzdorf:
For the sake of argument, let\'s say that your computer is worth $750 on the used market and the upgrade is $600. That\'s $1350. For $1350 you can just about buy last week\'s dual-processor 1.4 Mac, which is a much better use of your $600. Even if the performance were identical and you could be 100% confident that no incompatibilties exist, the upgraded Mac won\'t be worth as much on the used market when you finally do sell it.<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">All of this is true but it is also true that no matter how you slice it you are going to pay $400 - $600 per year to own and operate a computer (sans software)

Ed

[Nick Batzdorf]

I\'m not sure I see the connection...