We don't know why, but some people seem to consider warranties to be some sort of personal affront, as if only spineless jellyfish would ever fall back on such a wussy safety net; thus, they look for ways to void those evil things as quickly as possible. Well, reckless Mac-owners, rejoice-- for one of your ilk has discovered a new manner in which to void the warranty on Apple's most expensive Mac available. Well, okay, it's not really a new manner, per se, but this is the first we've heard of this specific application of an age-old practice to the current cream of Apple's crop.

While it's not necessarily as creative or extreme a method as running your car through the car wash with your dual-processor 1 GHz Power Mac strapped to the luggage rack ("Hot wax? Yes, please!"), it does have two big advantages: 1) if done properly, it might boost your Mac's performance by 20%; and 2) the procedure involves using a hot soldering iron, which always introduces a thrilling element of potentially permanent damage and the possibility of searing flesh. Woo-hoo!!

So, courtesy of a pointer from faithful viewer Johnny Asbury, here it is: how to overclock your 1 GHz processors to 1.2 GHz, thus nuking your warranty so thoroughly that it technically never actually existed in the first place, while earning you the right to brag about owning the fastest Mac that Apple has never sold. Note that we here at AtAT are utter hardware wimps who, amazingly enough, believe that warranties are good things, so we just have to say, kids-- don't try this at home. But feel free to read through the step-by-step instructions, study the pretty pictures, and thrill to the Apple System Profiler screenshots and benchmark results which clearly show that the tweaked Mac is indeed running its G4s at a sketchy but darned impressive 1.2 GHz apiece and reaping the expected speed benefits.

Oh, if only Xtrem were alive to see this. The folks at Xtrem, you'll recall, first claimed in August of 2000 that they planned to ship a 1.2 GHz single-processor Mac, then dropped that to 1066 MHz, and eventually disappeared completely-- almost as if they were... a hoax. (Gasp! Consternation! Uproar!) But if they were still around, we know exactly what they'd say about Marc Schrier's overclocked wonder: "Well, okay, sure, it runs at 1.2 GHz. But does it look like a giant microphone? Yeah, we didn't think so. Punk."