Certain older Macs are able to take advantage of adding an external graphics card through modification. This is article is broken up into 3 parts, as it contains a lot of information and pictures. Please refer to part 1 of the article for hardware/parts prerequisites. Sections 1 through 5 are contained in part 1, Sections […]
Category Archives: Maximize Your Mac
An introduction and some history A bit over a decade ago, Apple released the 2011 MacBook Pro with the now infamous Radeon 6000 series discrete Graphics Card. Both the Early and Late 2011 models were prone to spontaneous failure which has been well documented online starting with initial complaints in the Apple Support community. Eventually […]
Certain older Macs are able to take advantage of adding an external graphics card through modification. This is article is broken up into 3 parts, as it contains a lot of information and pictures. Please refer to part 1 of the article for hardware/parts prerequisites. Sections 1 through 5 are contained in part 1, Sections […]
Certain older Macs are able to take advantage of adding an external graphics card through modification. This usually requires external power, the corresponding adapters, can be done via the mini-PCIe slot or MXM slot, and come with case-by-case caveats as most of this was never intended to be a thing. Once installed and properly connected, […]
While this has been covered elsewhere online, it will be posted here for our LEM readers! A few years back, a LEM Facebook group user found a neat trick on getting a cost-effective, more modernized Bluetooth/Wifi solution for his Power Mac G5. Though his was a PCIe model, there is an easy way to get […]
Although this topic has been documented elsewhere, it will also be covered on Low End Mac for our readers. While bluetooth and wifi technology have since moved onto newer standards – Bluetooth 5.3 and Wifi 6 respectively, this adapter offers a pop-in replacement where the old AirPort card was. Rather than shoehorning a full-on PCIe […]
We’re all familiar with silver, space gray and now space black.. but what about all the other colors? This wasn’t enough, as colorful Macs started trickling back in. We had gold and rose gold with the late intel MacBook Airs and MacBooks, and finally had colorful iMacs again with the M1 iMac. Ryan Anderson made […]
The following is an article about a story of what happened to a LEM group member’s peculiar Power Mac G5, as well as the experiences I had troubleshooting my own. I was browsing our Low End Mac FaceBook group a few nights ago, when someone posted about having issues with their Power Mac G5 potentially […]
Fresh to the Low End Mac mailbag from FaceBook User Michael Vega: “Possibly known knowledge, but I wanted to show a proof of concept and I’m glad it works. I have a thunderbolt 3 dock, but it works with Thunderbolt 2/1 Macs. My work laptops are a current generation of Lenovo PCs with Thunderbolt 4, […]
The official “De Jure” Mac OS X Snow Leopard was announced at WWDC 2008, released August 28th 2009, and ultimately was never intended to run on PowerPC in the end. For a long time, it was known there were PowerPC-compatible beta builds of OS X Snow Leopard, however, these builds remained seemingly elusive until 2020. […]
In the world of Mac CPU hardware upgrades for your Power Mac G4, the Sonnet Encore/ST G4 1.6 is an aesthetically pleasing one, shaded with vibrant yet deep purple colors. Although it wasn’t a Dual CPU model, it was available seemingly for a long time, and was still available for purchase in December 2010 off […]
From one configuration to another, 2 processor transitions apart. It’s been a month since the 24″ 2006 iMac in my possession has been modified, being turned into a sort of CustoMac. With an external display modified into the Mac itself, along with a newer graphics card, operating system, and all of the smaller components required […]
The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, aka PCIe, is a longstanding serial computer expansion bus standard created in 2003. The Late 2005 Power Mac G5 was the only PowerPC Mac which took advantage of this technology, which had a production run of October 2005 – August 2006. As a result, AGP/PCI-based Macs received 1-2 years lesser […]
The 2003 Power Mac G5 was the first in a line of controversial 64-Bit PowerPC Macs, which suffered from above average hardware failure/glitchiness rates. While not the most popular Mac in the lineup of PowerPC Macs overall, the Power Mac G5 still packs a punch, and can be used for a wide variety of things. […]
The 2007 iMac has been around for a while, falling by the wayside, as it’s internal hardware doesn’t have many upgrade paths… or does it? A little known secret is hidden inside every early intel iMac made by Apple prior to their 21.5″/27″ transition.. they all have a Mini-PCIe slot! While many upgrades have […]
There are noticeably few articles, if any, about the 2006 and 2007 Mac Pros, that help you diagnose memory issues. I am changing this by documenting my own experiences with my primary computer, a Mac Pro 2,1. This article should help you recognize any memory symptoms with your Mac Pro and resolve them quickly.
I have a 2007 Mac Pro sitting in front of me that I wanted to make much faster than a hard drive allows. If having a single SSD (Solid State Drive) is nice, works well, and really brings the life out of these older Mac Pros, what if we wanted even more speed? What if […]
There is an earlier article by Dan Knight about CPU upgrades in the 2007 iMac that omits a few possible upgrades. This article is predominantly aimed at helping people get a “Penryn” Core 2 Duo CPU into their Early 2007 iMac, as the chipset does allow several “newer” CPU upgrades.
Sometimes we think too much into whether we can – so much so that we don’t question whether we should. This is a dilemma which faced me several times as I pushed the envelope, took the risk, and got away with jamming 64 GB of RAM right into my Mac Pro 2,1. In this article, […]
Despite the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 (2006/7) models hitting past the 10-year mark, there is, surprisingly, a great amount of hardware that is still available for use. In contrast to the age of the older (first) Mac Pros, there is still some new hardware that is being released, which can be used on these […]
Now that Apple has kicked the first version of the Mac Pro out of the family, I think it’s safe to say that it’s now part of our family – a low-end Mac – yet one with extraordinary power waiting to be uncorked.
Today, I am maximizing the Power Mac G5, with the 2 GHz dual-core Late 2005 version being my test subject. We are going to benchmark the stock Mac just as I received it and then upgrade it with more memory, a new hard drive, and an SSD.
