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I purchased a GigaDesigns upgrade from OWC and, on the whole, I'm rather pleased with the purchase -- G-cellerator 1.25GHz ($439, plus $33.50 shipping [Taiwan]). My QuickSilver w/ 1GB RAM is now running at a healthy (and pleasantly snappy) 1.33GHz, which is an improvement of 81 percent over the stock 733MHz processor. I've uploaded pictures of the upgrade module, included materials and packaging, here. Installation The physical installation was easy. I did spend a few minutes getting the heatsink off, but this was just a matter of adjusting the force used until the clips released. No furry wonkers... (not a big deal). Setting the system bus jumpers was also easy and the illustrated installation instructions left little to chance here. The one thing missing from Giga's instructions are voltage settings. The installation guide states users should call customer support number for instructions from a technician. This is undoubtedly a hassle for both customer and company, but I think it's an intelligent way of handling voltage jumpers -- misuse of which can easily lead to disaster. Running it... Initially, I set the G-cellerator and ran it at 1.467GHz (11X) for the better part of an hour without incident. However, when running Xbench 1.1.3, I experienced a crash I had never seen before -- a black screen scrolling the same error over and over (exception error #XXXXXX followed by a paragraph of engineering gibberish). When the smoke cleared, the result was the loss of my boot volume (40GB Seagate, still under warranty) and the data therein. Thankfully, my iTunes collection, iPhoto database and working files were all stored elsewhere. Further, regular backups to my .Mac iDisk allowed a fast recovery of addresses, bookmarks, Keychains, etc. Running again... After a quick install and recovery (about 1 hour), I stepped the G-cellerator back to 1.33GHz where it is seemed happy. Though Giga advertises this upgrade as tested to 1.4GHz (10.5X), I experienced three consecutive kernal panics (panic, restart and immediate panic, restart and immediate panic) at that speed. At 10X the advertised system bus speed (133MHz), my Quicksilver is stable. At nearly double the original 733MHz clock speed, it's much more responsive in nearly all respects. And, though not quite as fast as I hoped, this upgrade is still running at 6 percent faster than the advertised speed of 1.25GHz. Here are some cursory benchmark numbers: CINEBENCH 2003 v1 • Rendering (CPU) -- 121 (1.33GHz) -- 65 (800MHz G4*) Altivec Fractal Demo • Average of 5,400 Mflops -- 4770 Mflops (1.33GHz G4*) * comparison numbers borrowed from XLR8 Your Mac's 1.25GHz G-cellerator review.
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