G-Celerator G4 CPU

That speed demon of a Mac you bought a few years back is beginning to feel a bit tired. It puffs when presented with Photoshop filters and you’re increasingly spending time staring at progress bars. So what’s the answer? You could buy a brand new Mac, but you don’t fancy the hassle of reinstalling everything to get it just the way you like it. Thankfully, there is an alternative: a processor upgrade.

Giga Designs is a new name in the processor upgrade market, and the G-Celerator range is a series of upgrades that plug directly into the daughter-card socket on a G4 desktop – from the Sawtooth all the way up to the MDD model. Installation is simple and takes just five minutes. There are decent enough instructions, and you don’t need to worry about cooling because the card comes with its own heatsink and fan.

We tested the 1.25GHz G-Celerator on a 400MHz G4 desktop. Fitting it was a breeze and soon we were booted up in OS X, enjoying speed increases that users of older Macs will really notice. Photoshop filters zipped through jobs in anything from half to a third of the time taken when the machine was wheezing along with its old processor. Although Giga Designs is careful to say that it doesn’t recommend overclocking, it also makes it quite clear that the processor has been tested up to 1.4GHz. The overclocking speeds of the processor care are set via five jumper pins on the daughter card. There’s a fully illustrated guide, showing all the settings, included in the box with the processor.

We did have one or two problems getting our G4 to boot under OS 9, so if you do want to run OS 9 natively we recommend that you check with the dealer if they are willing to refund you in the event that the card doesn’t work satisfactorily on your computer.

For Mac lovers who don’t want to splash out on a new machine, the Giga Designs G-Celerator is a cost-effective way of squeezing a few more years out of your desktop.