Benchmarked: NewerTech G4 1.8 GHz Upgrade

Last week I went over upgrading a PowerMac with one of NewerTech’s fabulous G4 upgrades (single processor, 1.8 GHz), and the process was easy enough when done with some common sense and a lack of rush. This week I’ll go further in depth about the true power of this G4 upgrade and its potential use in a media Center.

 
If you missed last week’s review, here is the link, but for now I’ll be focusing more on the G4’s speed and how well it fares in a future media center setup. I intend for this PowerMac to be an Apple TV on steroids, overdosed and then some. I’ve begun the necessary preparations, but the only thing I lack is a suitable video card (I was beat by only 10 seconds on eBay, I swear!). For these benchmarks a video card won’t be too much of a necessity, although my urge for high def goodness doesn’t feel the same way. I gave NewerTech’s G4 upgrade a high rating and one of my annoyances with it was the slightly audible fans. They’re not on the scale of anything that would alert the Weather Channel or suddenly convert my PowerMac into a wind tunnel, but you do know it’s there, just pumping out cold air. I was actually shocked at this; weren’t PowerPC based processors supposed to be hot, so much so that the PowerMac G5 was basically a monstrous heat sink begging for Photoshop work? In this case it isn’t, so I did what any daring person would and took out the dual fans. That’s right, I now have a quieter PowerMac, and the only fan running is the monstrous, albeit slow, one in the side that blows cool air over the video card and processor heatsink. I’m not sure how well this setup would fare in other PowerMacs but I don’t intend to do a Myth Busters-like blog post debunking the usefulness of heatsink fans. Nonetheless, this is welcome news for those aiming to convert their PowerMacs into similar setups. Now for the real meat of it all.

iTunes

I’m not much of a CD person as I get all my music from iTunes, but when setting up a Media Center one has to deal with all kinds of media from photos to video, and of course, music. This also means importing this kind of media using any means necessary. I rummaged through the house for a CD and grabbed the first thing that came into my sight, a Queen CD. I haven’t listened to this before nor did I know of its existence, but I did know that it was going into my PowerMac purely for the purposes of benchmarking, although I am told though this band is quite good. I ripped the CD using the AAC encoder in iTunes set at 256kbps Stereo. This took about 45 minutes, not marginally better than my test Mac Mini.

Visual Hub

Heroes Episode 9—Optimize for iPhone Quality—High, H.264 encoding, Low CPU Priority disabled. One other important component of having a Mac media would have to be Visual Hub. Visual Hub, along with the free App iSquint, fills in the void for converting content and in this case I need my media to play nice with iTunes, which will eventually be siphoned through to Front Row. True, I could use the incredibly awesome Quicktime Plugin Perian which allows me to play many of the available formats that aren’t QT compatible, but unfortunately I cannot install the same Plugin on my iPhone. For my test I used Episode 9 of Heroes season 2 already formatted as a .AVI. I’ve been fond of iSquint and recently upgraded to Visual Hub, but dumped the former due to the exceptional speed increases. I found a slight speed bump when I upgrade to 10.5.1 but found a slightly greater increase from using my Mac Mini. It took roughly 2 hours to convert into an iPhone friendly format (H.264, high quality) with Low CPU Priority disabled. The same configuration ran on a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini and turned out to take close to 2 hours 35 minutes.

Handbrake
I have an ample library of DVDs that I have ripped using Handbrake and was annoyed at how long it took my Mac Mini (G4 1.25 GHz) to finish one movie. Oftentimes it was 18-24 hours when converted into an H.264 file, and MP4 took roughly 1/3. This isn’t so desirable when all of your system resources are being sucked to the bone. Much to my dismay, a similar situation occurred about a week ago and I questioned if my investment in a G4 upgrade was worth it when an Intel Mac would obviously chew this PowerMac to nothing more than scrap metal. Hardly a day later did Leopard’s first point update which drastically increased DVD ripping speed; it was as if new life was breathed into my Mac, and the same can be said for my Mac Mini and PowerBook. Using Handbrake on 10.5.0, I managed about 15 hours to rip Inside Man (great movie, definitely worth a rental if people still do that nowadays) with the followings specs. H.264 (iPod) formatted, 768 kbps. This was with no other applications running. When updated to 10.5.1, I tried the same movie and settings but found a 4 hour decrease in overall time, something not easily obtained. This alone made me believe that a PowerPC based Mac can still function as a fully functional media center.

So now that this has been benchmarked, there’s only one thing left, to really make this into a super Media center rig. I’ll be sure to give a preview here on Apple Matters, but the real juicy bits and the full setup will be featured in Chris Seibold’s Big Book of Apple Hacks.