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The increasingly attractive prices for processor card and RAM upgrades makes the prospect of breathing new life into a legacy machine seem enticing.

This week, MacsOnly! posted a report on hotrodding a couple of old 604-based Macs by tricking them out with G4 processor upgrades, more RAM, and larger hard drives.

The subject machines were a PowerComputing PowerBase 180 and a Power Mac 7300. The speed equipment used included a PowerLogix PowerForce 450 MHz G4 CPU ($279) RAM upgraded to 136 MB.in the PowerBase and 208 MB in the 7300, a 10 GB Maxtor ATA drive (plus a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 controller card for the SCSI-based 7300), and a Sony CRX160E 12x8x32x CD-RW ATA drive.

The benchmark comparison (run using Mac OS 9.1) with MacsOnly!'s 450 MHz G4 Cube proved very interesting.

The souped up PowerMac 7300, which has a 50 MHz system bus, actually bested the Cube in the Altivec Fractal Carbon, MacBench 5 CPU, and MacBench 5 FPU tests, although it lagged substantially in the Guage Pro 1.1 and especially the Virtual PC 4 Manual Scroll tests. The PowerBase with its poky 40 MHz bus was naturally slower than the 7300, but acquitted itself quite impressively as well. You can view a comparison graph of the results here: http://www.macsonly.com/

I have been waffling over whether to do something like this with my UMAX S-900 for over a year now. On the plus side, my S-900, purchased unused in May, 2000, has very little running time on it, and is extensively expandable, with 6 PCI slots, eight RAM slots (supporting a maximum of 1 GB of RAM), 7 drive days, and two SCSI buses. It already has been upgraded with USB and FireWire PCI adapter cards. And while it is not especially speedy by modern standards with the 200 MHz 604e processor that's in it now, the results achieved by MacsOnly! Indicate that it could be quite a potent machine with an and injection of elixir de G4.

What has held me back is the value saw-off between what it would take to modernize the S-900's performance, versus applying that cost to the purchase of a newer, faster Mac, as well as the upside limitations imposed by the UMAX's 50 MHz internal system bus, which is roughly 25% slower than the 66 MHz bus in the iBook that imposes a bit of a bottleneck on that machine's performance.

For example, in addition to a G4 processor upgrade card, in order to make the S-900 an adequate workhorse machine, I would also need to get a bigger hard drive than its current 4 GB Quantum unit, an ATA unit plus the Sonnet controller card, at least 128 MB more RAM, and a better video card than the poky one transplanted from a UMAX J-700 that's in it now.

My ballpark estimate for what this all would cost is in the neighborhood of $625 plus freight and taxes, which is getting mighty close to the price of a good used iMac, which has a faster bus and native support for OS X as opposed to the hack necessary to get X to run on the upgraded S-900.

The potential is tempting, but the cost an limitations continue to hold me back.