I recently bought a PowerMac G4, and not just any PowerMac G4, a FW800 dual CPU, 1.4 GHz PowerPC 7455. Making it the fastest G4 Apple ever shipped in RAW performance, the fastest clock speed going to the 1.67 GHz PowerBook.

  / dmug  

What makes this particular PowerMac of interest, is it that ability to OS X 10.2-10.5 and with a bit of hacking, also Mac OS 9, meaning it's also the fastest Mac OS 9 computer Apple shipped. That's an important distinction to made as you can upgrade these guys to dual 2 GHz 7448s, which are improved G4s that Apple never shipped but have double the L2 Cache, clocking at 1 MB over the 7455, faster front bus and lower power consumption thanks to a newer manufacturing node, from 130 nm to 90 nm.

My idea was that I'd have a visually clean build that sits onto of my filing cabinet, hidden cables so I'd have a functional and out of the way retro Mac.


Action Retro: Who Said Macs Can't Have Great Graphics? - Building the World's Fastest G4, Part 2
   • Who Said Macs Can't Have Great Graphi...