Meeting the Challenge of Muffling a G4
Apple makes some of the quietest personal computers on the market, but the Power Mac G4 isn’t among them. TheiMac family and the recently discontinued Cube lack noisy fans, but the pro-oriented Power Mac G4 sounds like a vacuum cleaner.
This giant sucking sound might not be a problem in cubicle country, but it’s a distraction in quiet home offices. And it’s a disaster in recording studios, video production facilities and radio stations--places where a G4’s processing punch is almost as essential as silence.
As someone who does audio and video production in a home office, I’m particularly sensitive to computer noise. Two years ago, I banished my Windows vacuum cleaner to a ventilated cabinet 20 feet away from my desk. My solution was simple and inexpensive: I bought 25-foot extensions for the PC’s monitor, keyboard, mouse and speaker cables and then crawled under my house and ran the cables beneath the floor.
But a Power Mac G4 presents unique challenges. For one thing, its mouse and keyboard connect via Universal Serial Bus ports, and with USB, simple extension cables can’t reliably span distances of more than about 15 feet. What’s more, Apple’s flat-panel displays use a proprietary cable and connector--the Apple Display Connector, or ADC--that carries power as well as USB and video signals. There isn’t an extension cable on the planet that can meet a challenge like that.
My search for a Mac muffler led me to Woodland Hills-based Gefen Inc. (https://www.gefen.com), which manufactures hardware designed for getting noisy Macs and PCs out of earshot. These devices often are called KVM extenders because they extend the keyboard, video and mouse connectors.
At first glance, Gefen’s ADC-100 looked perfect: It would allow me to put my G4 up to 330 feet away from my desk. But because it uses costly fiber-optic links, the ADC-100 costs $2,995--more than what most Power Mac G4s cost.
My silencing project became easier and less expensive when I decided to forgo Apple’s flat-panel display in favor of an analog display, specifically the ViewSonic VG175. Because the Power Mac G4 provides an analog video connector in addition to the ADC jack, it can connect to Windows-compatible VGA displays. By bypassing ADC, I eliminated the need for a $3,000 extender.
Instead, I’m using a $600 one: Gefen’s CAT5-2000, which extends USB, analog video and audio signals up to 330 feet. A versatile, cross-platform product, the CAT5-2000 also can extend Windows PS/2-style keyboard and mouse connectors as well as the Apple Desktop Bus ports used in older Macs.
The CAT5-2000 comprises two metal boxes, each about the size of a typical computer speaker. One box is a sender unit and provides ports that connect to your computer’s monitor and audio and USB jacks. The other box is a receiver unit containing jacks that connect to your display, keyboard and mouse and speakers. You connect the sender and receiver boxes using CAT-5 cables, the kind used for Ethernet network connections.
The CAT5-2000 receiver box contains front-panel controls for fine-tuning video quality. They work well: The image quality on the ViewSonic analog display is nearly identical to that of Apple’s all-digital display. And because the ViewSonic VG175 provides two video-input jacks, I’m able to switch between my Mac and Windows machines by pressing a button on the front of the display. In the world of the geek, this is living large.
Downsides? The CAT5-2000 receiver box has just one USB jack, so I’ll need to add a powered USB hub to connect scanners, cameras and other doodads. And the CAT5-2000 doesn’t extend FireWire, so I have to plod across my office to connect digital video camcorders and FireWire hard drives. I call this my exercise break.
Your mix of gear and the distance you need to span will influence your choice of KVM hardware. But if your work demands a quiet environment, products like the CAT5-2000 can be worth their weight in gold.
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Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine.
