Speed up your Mac by replacing its parts. Save cash by doing it yourself.
Software tweaks can greatly speed up an older Mac. But sometimes, your system will simply lack the necessary hardware to keep up with more power-hungry apps. In that case, no amount of software sorcery can boost your performance as much as a component upgrade.
Intel-based Macs can be upgraded in a few key ways, but you’ll have fewer options compared to PC-using friends. Specifically, you probably can’t--or rather, shouldn’t--replace the processor. That upgrade could make as much difference as putting a racing engine into a puttering car, but sadly, nobody officially sells Mac processor upgrades for Intel systems.
Sure, you might be able to install a faster Intel processor from a PC parts store. But the uncertain results--including potentially damaging your Mac--keep processor upgrades off-limits for most. (See our online article “Upgrade Your iMac to a Core 2 Duo Processor” to learn more.
When push comes to shove, Intel Macs can most often be upgraded in three main hardware areas: RAM, video cards, and hard disks. We’ll explain how to get started and which of these upgrades could give you the most benefit.
The first time you open up your Mac can be a scary rite of passage. But if you arm yourself with the right tools, you can make these upgrades yourself.
First, focus on your workspace. Clear a moderate amount of space on a work surface. Take precautions against potentially zapping your system with static electricity--even subtle shocks could fry components. Try to work in a room without carpet, and keep your shoes on. If you’re extremely cautious, you could line the area with a rubber pad--even discarded mouse pads--to add another layer of electrical insulation while keeping your computer case free from scratches.
When you’re ready to get to work, turn off the Mac, and remove all of its cables, other than the power cord. (Remove the battery if it’s a laptop.) Touch the outside of the PCI slots on a desktop Mac: Those are the metal rows where your video card and other expansion cards would sit. On a laptop, touch any metal lining the battery area--just not the battery connection pins themselves. Then unplug the power cord before you continue.
This process should safely discharge any potential electricity. For extra protection, you can also wear an antistatic wrist strap throughout your upgrade, though we’ll admit to frequently shirking this step. Get one for a few dollars wherever you buy your upgrade component(s), and clip it to a metal part of the case, such as that PCI slot grating on a Mac tower.
Review just what you need before beginning. Check iFixit (www.ifixit.com) and Other World Computing (eshop.macsales.com/installvideos) for great disassembly guides. Other vendors often provide their own directions too.
Many desktop and laptop upgrades can be tackled with just a #0 Phillips screwdriver and maybe a coin, but you might have an easier time with some extra tools. Have a few guitar picks of differing thickness to use for prying open drive doors without scratching anything. And as you remove screws, put each group into its own compartment of a Monday-through-Friday pillbox, so you can just reverse your steps to reassemble everything. Or, one of our favorite tricks, use a piece of tape, sticky-side up, to place your screws on until you need them.
Keep all new components in their protective, electrostatic bags until you’re ready to install them. Handle all circuit-board parts--such as RAM and video cards--by touching only the edges. With hard drives, similarly, avoid touching exposed chips and circuits. Skin oils or contaminants can damage those components.
Random access memory acts as a buffer between your ultrafast processor and comparatively slow hard disk. In effect, OS X uses RAM to temporarily store information instead of having to keep accessing it from the hard disk. This crucial connection makes adding RAM the single-best upgrade you can perform on any Mac. Lucky for you, it’s also one of the easiest to do yourself.
More RAM lets you keep more apps and windows open at the same time, speeding up the system when juggling these tasks. It doesn’t inherently make your Mac “faster”--that’s up to the processor or other limiting factors, such as Internet speed. But a RAM-happy system will handle more tasks at once without slowing down, while a RAM-starved system can get bogged down with just a few applications running at the same time.
If your Mac still has the same amount of memory as when you bought it, consider an upgrade. We recommend having at least 2GB RAM, with 4GB acting as a roomy target for most users. High-end graphical applications, such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, can benefit from even more RAM, but you won’t see nearly the same boost from 4GB to 8GB as you would from 1GB or less to 2GB.
Check EveryMac (www.everymac.com) to see how many RAM slots your system has available. You might have to remove current RAM and replace it with a higher-capacity module. Also go to Applications > Utilities > System Profiler. Pick Hardware then Memory. This shows you how much RAM your Mac has in each slot.
RAM prices are volatile and can differ among vendors. Check out DealRAM (www.dealram.com) and Ramseeker (www.ramseeker.com), sites that aggregate RAM prices from many outlets. Each lets you shop by computer type. Double-check in your manual or EveryMac.com to make sure you get the right type.
To get a sense of the performance gains you can achieve by adding more RAM (see chart, facing page), where we’ve aggregated performance data for memory and hard drive upgrades on a select group of older Intel-based Macs.
A video card upgrade can give a big performance boost, but only a few Macs qualify for this improvement. Forget about upgrading the video card on a Mac mini, any laptop, or the iMac. Only Mac Pro owners can do it, and even then, you might have a hard time finding the best card. (Video card upgrades also exist for PowerPC Macs, if you can find a store carrying those parts.)
If you have an aging Mac Pro with the original video card, a new one will pay off in a few ways. You’ll be able to drive higher resolutions to displays. In fact, if you’re connecting multiple high-res screens for graphics or video work, a graphics card upgrade is a must. And high-end graphics apps sometimes take advantage of the video card for better performance. But gamers will enjoy the biggest boost in the form of faster frame rates and larger resolutions in 3D games.
If you don’t fit any of those groups, don’t write off a video card upgrade just yet. Apple supports OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and other technologies that offload processor-intensive tasks to the graphics card. Since those cards have gotten so powerful in the past several years, they can significantly speed up any software that taps in. Mac OS X 10.6--that is, Snow Leopard--will take advantage of graphics cards in these ways, potentially boosting the speed of all computing tasks.
AMD (www.amd.com) and Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) make the only Mac graphics cards. Check directly with those companies or www.apple.com for options.
If you need a little more elbow room, upgrading your Mac’s internal hard drive offers both more room to stretch out and potentially faster data-access speeds. If you switch from a conventional hard disk to a solid-state drive (SSD), you’ll definitely notice a speed increase in certain situations.
Costly SSDs lack moving parts, so instead of spinning a platter to find data, they instantly pull information from embedded chips. Your biggest payoff will be in these drives’ silence and resilience. (And that’s why, for example, the Eddie Bauer First Ascent blog team--a group of pro climbers, writers, photographers, and videographers--brought MacBooks outfitted with SSDs on a recent expedition up Mount Everest).
OS X likes to cache information in the disk, so if your startup disk has less than 5GB left on it, you might notice a significant speed boost by adding a higher-capacity drive.
Any Mac can take a hard disk upgrade. The Mac Pro and recent laptops easily swap--or add additional--drives. You’ll remove a door on the portables or open the case on the tower Mac. The Mac mini, iMac, and older laptops can require more steps, but they can also be upgraded.
If you’re replacing a drive, consider how you’ll transfer data to the new one. An external FireWire or USB 2.0 drive enclosure (see our roundup of drive docks) works well if your Mac supports those interfaces (a few recent laptops lack FireWire). Or you can opt for a temporary cable that connects to the bare drive. Pick up either from a reseller such as OWC (www.macsales.com) or Fry’s (www.frys.com).
Perform the data transfer with the Migration Assistant (in Applications > Utilities or when prompted midway through an OS installation on the internal drive). Or, boot the Mac while holding down the Option key, and select the external drive. Then use Carbon Copy Cloner ($10, www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html), to transfer everything back to the internal drive.
For full instructions on installing a new internal drive on your particular Mac laptop or desktop, see iFixit.com.
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