News for Tuesday, 3 May 2005

Al Olk has made a nice piece of work!
Since he could not buy a high-end Mac edition graphic card, due to either availability or the "ridiculous" price asked for it, he has decided to flash a PC graphic card. His choice: ASUS V9999 Game Edition, powered by a GF6800 (not a GT neither an Ultra).
He is describing in Strangedogs forum, how one can quickly and easily (2 resistors to be modified + ROM flashing) transform a not overpriced PC graphic card into a top notch GeForce 6800 Ultra Mac.
The original post:ici
The text version of the procedure:ici
The link for the images
The success of this procedure is probably due to both the under clocked GPU and the 256MB of GDDR3 used in this model.
[update]: The DVI output is still not functional but Al Olk is working on it.
An ASUS V9999GE graphic card can be found in France for 370€. The price for a GF6800Ultra DDL on The AppleStore: 699€.

The eMac have been updated too, mostly to include a faster processor. Like the iMacs, they are shipping with Tiger (and an internal modem).
- eMac Combo :
G4 at 1.42 GHz
256 MB of RAM, ATA 80 GB, Combo
ATI Radeon 9600 (64 MB DDR)
799 euros ($799 in the US)
- eMac Combo :
G4 at 1.42 GHz
512 MB of RAM, ATA 160 GB, 8x SuperDrive
ATI Radeon 9600 (64 MB DDR)
998,99 euros TTC ($999 in the US)

The updated iMacs have been announced by a press release.
The Apple Store has been updated to include the new models.
On the menu, just like with G5, a 200 MHz increase in processor speed (1.8 and 2 GHz now).
On all iMacs the video card is a Radeon 9600 with 128 MB of RAM.
All machines now come with 512 MB of RAM.
Disk Capacity in on the increase too, with 250 GB on the 20 inch.
The Superdrive is now a 8x (Dual Layer) on models that include one.
All models still include a Modem, and come with TIGER preinstalled.
Finally, the price of the high-end model is now 100 Euros/100 USD cheaper.
Here's a sum up of all three configurations:
- iMac G5 17" - 1.8 GHz :
G5 at 1.8 GHz, 600 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 160 GB, Combo
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 MB DDR)
1299 euros/1299 USD
- iMac G5 17" - 2.0 GHz :
G5 at 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 160 GB, SuperDrive 8x
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 MB DDR)
1498,99 euros/1499 USD
- iMac G5 20" - 2.0 GHz :
G5 at 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 250 GB, SuperDrive 8x
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 MB DDR)
1799 euros TTC/1799 USD
To find out more:
iMac on the Apple Store
update 1:
The Superdrive is now a 8x Dual Layer
Good news, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 are now included in all configurations.
update 2: iMacs are now equipped with Gigabit Ethernet networking, up from the 10/100BT of previous models

The updated iMacs have been announced.
On the menu, just like with G5, a 200 MHz increase in processor speed (1.8 and 2 GHz now).
On all iMacs the video card is a Radeon 9600 with 128 MB of RAM.
All machines now come with 512 MB of RAM.
Disk Capacity in on the increase too, with 250 GB on the 20 inch.
The Superdrive is now a 8x Dual Layer on models that include one.
Good News, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 is now included in all configurations.
All models still include a Modem, and come with TIGER preinstalled.
Finally, the price of the high-end model is now 100 Euros/100 USD cheaper.
Here's a sum up of all three configurations:
- iMac G5 17" - 1.8 GHz :
G5 at 1.8 GHz, 600 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 160 GB, Combo
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 Mo DDR)
1299 euros/1299 USD
- iMac G5 17" - 2.0 GHz :
G5 at 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 160 GB, SuperDrive 8x
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 Mo DDR)
1498,99 euros/1499 USD
- iMac G5 20" - 2.0 GHz :
G5 at 2.0 GHz, 667 MHz Bus , 512 KB L2 cache
512 MB (SDRAM DDR400), SATA 250 GB, SuperDrive 8x
ATI Radeon 9600 (128 Mo DDR)
1799 euros TTC/1799 USD
To find out more:
iMac on the Apple Store

Before the official launch of tiger, rumors were spreading that Tiger will not be compatible with processor upgrade cards. This is of course wrong. But as usual, Apple does not bring support to modified computers.
Hereafter is a screenshot of a Cube, upgraded with a Gigadesigns cards, running MacOSX 10.4 "Tiger".

Everything works perfectly. The only missing piece of information is related to the "processor type": PowerPC60?

Last week a fire has seriously damaged an IC substrate plant of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), one of the world’s top IC packaging companies.
Small technical information: to produce a processor, one will first engrave circuit on silicium wafer. Once this is done, one will need to add connectors to the processor in order to be able to install it on its socket on a motherboard. This is called "packaging".
Among ASE's major customers, there are big names: ATI Technologies, Nvidia, Intel (almost 50% of ASE packaging capacity), Motorola, Infineon Technologies, Freescale Semiconductor (manufacturing G4 processor) and VIA Technologies. Replacement solutions do exist for those companies, but for sure this fire will impact the already tight capacity of PBGA and CSP substrate packaging. However, ASE is claiming that the damaged plant is only accounting for 10% of its overall packaging capacity.
The estimated time to repair damages is ranging between 3 and 6 months depending on the packaging activity; but it might translate into a shortage of some CPU and/or GPU for the customers.

No, we're not talking about the daughter of the famous family, but of their hotels.Hilton entered the iPod extravaganza :

It is now possible, in selected hotels, to plug your favourite music player to their special alarm clock "Just in Time".

It's no secret that H.264 is cpu hungry. A few tests proved that its appetite for processor power is gargantuan. We monitored Quicktime playing an HD movie trailer via top.
Playing an HD 720p (1280x544) file eats between 48 and 54% of cpu in a G5 dual 2.5 GHz (N.B. : a dual processor cpu usage goes up to 200%). The same trailer encoded in 1080p (1920x816) eats between 80 and 106% cpu power on the same machine. In any case, the playback was smooth, of course.
H.264 is way ahead of the game. So much, that it'll have to be a few years before it can become the standard codec for video on Joe Sixpack's machine.

According to XLR8yourmac, it ought to be possible to use *some* PRO features of QT7 in QT 6.5.2 without shelling out the cash for a licence. To achieve that, you'll need an installed copy of QT 6.5.2 PRO. Then, copy the Quicktime Player app bundle onto your tiger boot drive and rename it.
We haven't tested this hint, so feel free to send us your success/failure reports.
Btw, for those only wanting to play things in fullscreen, Roland reminded us that you just need to create a small applescript containing the following code :

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    present front movie scale screen
end tell

NVidia has requested a revision to the PCI-Express standard, in order to be able to add a second power connector on its next-gen cards! Knowing that PCI-Express allows for 75W, that would take the total power supply to 150W!
Imagine the heat such power would produce. In order to accomodate such a card, Apple would have to drastically revise the location of its PCI-Express connector relative to the PCI-X slot, due to the proximity of the CPU's cooling system.
[moose: YAY! Imagine: run DOOM3 maxed out on your PowerBook with the lid closed and there you are, you have a portable BBQ]

Thanks yakusa fot he tip.

An article published by eWeek.com raises concerns among the dark side of computing.
In his paper, San Gallager spills the beans: "Tiger server includes a new Access Control List (ACL) scheme that allows seamless access by Windows clients".
Yikes! It means that OSX 10.4 uses a scheme similar to that used by XP and Win 2k3 Server, allowing Win computers to access shares and applications exactly in the same way as on a Windows Server...
[moose: "they're trying to trick us, my precious, yessssss!"]
And if you consider that Apple doesn't charge on a per-client basis, a server running Tiger instead of Windows 2003 could save you big bucks"

On a similar topic, but on a grimer side, Jean-Philippe warns us that Cisco's VPN is not yet compatible with Tiger. The company has announced they would release an update before the end of the month.