No go on the G5 upgrade; Hello iMac

Well, the G5 video card upgrade I wrote about earlier didn’t work out. Two problems:

• The hacked Radeon 9800 Pro firmware only supported VGA. No DVI. That’s a bit of a problem considering my target LCD was a 23″ Apple Cinema Display. The Cinema Display only takes DVI, and feeding it with some sort of VGA to DVI converter just seemed backwards.
• iFreeze. Basically nearly all of the iApps (and only the iApps, oddly enough) freeze when doing Core Video stuff. So as soon as I go full screen and attempt to edit in iPhoto, or go to preview a DVD menu in iDVD, the app just freezes taking the system’s video with it. I can actually SSH into the box and do stuff, so the OS isn’t crashed, just the video output. On a desktop system, though, frozen video might as well be a complete system freeze…

Solution? Simple. I ordered a 24″ iMac with one of those fancy Intel Core 2 Duo chips. Since this thing is going to run Aperture, I did the sensible thing and went for the significantly faster 256MB 7600GT graphics upgrade option available (exclusively) on the 24″ model. Should be an awesome photo editing setup, really. I’ve been extremely hesitant of integrated computers in the past, but this is the first iMac that seemed really nicely equipped and was priced well enough that it was a no brainer compared to paying for a retail graphics card upgrade or buying a Mac Pro. So I’ll take my chances with the iMac. Hopefully I won’t regret it!

I’ll migrate the G5 tower to mostly server duties, I think. It’s a capable machine, so I don’t think there’s any point trying to offload it on the used market. Well, unless someone wants a G5 really bad for Photoshop and wants to give me a pile of cash for it.

Freezing Details: The really weird thing about the freezing video business is that it seems like a whole bunch of original G4-era Mac minis and the dreaded G5 Single boxes equipped with Radeon graphics cards also experienced *identical* problems. Same error logs, same symptoms. It feels a lot like an overheating card, but it’s not. You can sit there in an OpenGL game for hours, or with other 3rd party graphics intensive apps and never have a problem. But load up iPhoto and you’re toast. Weird stuff. Apple issued firmware updates for the G5s that magically resolved the problem, and outright replaced the minis in question, which leaves me with little ability to diagnose or fix the problem…