Upgrading Your eMac for Better Gaming and Hi-res Video Performance

Well, time for another "hot rodding" article. In my previous one Upgrading a Digital Audio G4 to Work Better in Leopard, I was modifying a dual processor 533 MHz Power Mac G4 to run Mac OS X 10.5. This time I am hot rodding a 1.25 GHz eMac to run Leopard with speed and also run games. I'm hoping on getting it to run HDTV as well.

We're starting out with a stock eMac this time: 256 MB of RAM, 17" display, Combo drive, and 40 GB hard drive.

I started with the hard drive. 40 GB is fine on the Digital Audio, but since I'll be using this Mac to store my entire iTunes library, HDTV movies, and games, I figured a larger hard drive would be nice. I remembered having an 80 GB drive around; I think I found it in a "Dumpster Dell" a year ago. The Dumpster Dell itself was worthless (AMD K6-2 333) and didn't work; but I did save the hard drive before throwing the Dell back into the dumpster.

Crossing my fingers, I put it in the eMac and booted from a Panther disk that happened to be lying around. Believe it or not, the dumpster drive showed up in the installer's Disk Utility as 'WDC CAVIAR 80.00 GB'. It was for some reason formatted in FAT32.

I took this good opportunity to format the 7200 rpm drive as HFS+, naming it "Dumpster Dell" just for fun.

So now I had a big hard drive, but I wasn't done yet.

I went to a local computer store and bought a 1 GB memory stick - they had a discount on memory sticks from that particular company (I think it was A-Data), and I got it quite cheaply. Now the eMac had 1.25 GB of RAM and an 80 GB drive.

I still felt like something was missing, though. That's right - the AirPort Card!

A quick Google search revealed that I needed an AirPort Extreme card. Crap. I had a few regular AirPort cards that were unused, but no Extreme. I was about to get out my checkbook when I remembered the purchase of my Digital Audio. When the computer arrived, included was also a box of miscellaneous stuff. I didn't care about that stuff then and put it somewhere. I found everything in a closet. I dug through the box. ATA cables, floppy cables, a Zip drive, a Pro Mouse and . . . Hurrah! In that box was an AirPort Extreme card. I installed it in the eMac, and now I was ready to rock.

Well, not just yet. I needed a SuperDrive to complete this project. Luckily I salvaged a DVD/RW from the Dumpster Dell. It was beige and quite scratched, but inside the eMac, that wouldn't matter.

The Leopard DVD booted, and I installed OS X 10.5 on the "Dumpster Dell" partition. That was a few weeks ago, and while it was installing, I worked on an article for Low End Mac.

Finally the cool intro music played, and I had to fill in my address, name, telephone number, etc. When that was done, I created an account with the full name of "Carl Nygren" and the short name of "dumpsterdell".

Leopard felt very speedy on the eMac. I started updating to 10.5.4 and downloaded all other updates as well. When that was done, I had myself another iHotrod to play with.

I started by installing my three favorite games for the Mac (and the PC): Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and its successor, Star Wars Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy. I also installed the great RPG game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I started playing Jedi Outcast, which despite its age (2002) can put some pressure on PCs because of its engine. Making my way through the galaxy as Kyle Katarn, I didn't notice any of the lags I saw on the eMac before its upgrade. Very good. I ran it at 1024 x 768 resolution with no worries at all.

How about the other two games? Jedi Academy also ran very smoothly at 1024 x 768 - it still chopped at times though, like when I was in lightsaber combat with three Sith at once ("Die, Jedi!"). Knights of the Old Republic ran very well at 1024 x 768 - no lags at all.

I'm a huge fan of Star Wars, so that's why I play those games. (I'd love to see a Jedi Knight IV someday!) But other games? I installed one of my all-time favorites for the PC, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. No lags at all. It has the same engine as Jedi Academy and never chopped, not even a tiny tiny bit.

So it's great for gaming, but how about HDTV?

I chose to watch an episode of House in 720p. Using Apple's QuickTime Player (the best player out there), it played just fine. After watching it to the end, I got one of Microsoft's 1080p samples. Look at that quality! It chopped a bit at times; but other than that, decent. I still wouldn't recommend going over 720p though.

And everything else? Well, Front Row runs (of course), and so does Time Machine. Oh, and that AirPort Extreme card works fine too.

Was it worth the effort to upgrade?

I was certainly lucky to salvage a working 80 GB drive from a dumpster find, but they're not very expensive. If you're willing to pay a little for the SuperDrive, the 80 GB drive, and the memory stick (and, of course, AirPort Extreme), you have a powerful machine that will serve you well for years to come.

I like G4 Macs because they are generally easy to upgrade and CPU upgrades are available for older, slower models. G3s are nice too, but many of them (not the Pismo, dual USB iBooks, and slot-loading iMacs) lack AGP graphics, and as such are not compatible.

So, yes, it's definitely worth it. If you need raw power, however, I'd recommend going with a G5. No matter how good G4 Macs are, it's an aging chip, and the G5 has so much more power.

I'd just like to add a fun thing: I liked the Dumpster Dell name so much that I set that name for the hard drives on all my 680x0 Macs. :-)

I'd also like to update you on all those Macs I'll be picking up. We've planned it for later this week or early next week, and once they're up and running, count an article.