Cube video card

I suggest looking for a flashed nVidia 6200 on eBay. It is the best Cube card out there right now.

It depends. Do you want to run an ADC monitor? If so, you've got only a few realistic options, and the 2MX is one of them. Most of the Cube 2MX cards shipped with a fan instead of a heat sink. Realistically, I don't think you have to worry about it much, one way or another. If you don't plan on using an ADC monitor with the Cube, you've got a number of other options, including flashed PC video cards. I'd avoid any that require major modifications of the Cube to install.

Once upon a time I had all of this information at my fingertips, but it's been awhile. With that caveat in mind... my recollection is that you can swap the faceplates on the 2MX with the Cube's stock RagePro 128 for a factory-perfect fit. Another option you might want to consider is a Mac edition Radeon 7500. It is dual ADC and VGA. The faceplate does not fit, but I've run mine for years without the faceplate with no problems (I've also seen instructions for modifying the faceplate, but never bothered). I bought mine several years ago for around $40 on eBay, a brand new Apple OEM part. I was worried for awhile that the lack of a fan on this card would cause problems, but it hasn't hiccuped once in my years of use. Performance-wise, probably about the same as the 2MX, maybe a bit better, depending on who you ask.

My Cube replaced a PowerMac 9600, the biggest and probably one of the noisiest Macs ever made. The decibel relief was amazing, especially after I replaced the clunky stock 5200 RPM Western Digital drive in the Cube with a super-quiet Seagate. Another Cube feature you will learn to love, if you get an ADC display, is the touch power button on the front of the display. I'm sure, when I finally give up the Cube, that this will be the feature I'll miss the most.

http://cubeowner.com/kbase_2/index.php?category=2

Make sure to take a look at that website since it's probably the best cube resource on the web. I've learned a lot about my cube there.

For the record my cube has a Geforce MX2 and it works great. I'm not sure if it was custom made for the cube, but I'm sure that F.A.Q can help you and if not sign up for the helpful forums.

IJ Reilly said:

Once upon a time I had all of this information at my fingertips, but it's been awhile. With that caveat in mind... my recollection is that you can swap the faceplates on the 2MX with the Cube's stock RagePro 128 for a factory-perfect fit. Another option you might want to consider is a Mac edition Radeon 7500. It is dual ADC and VGA. The faceplate does not fit, but I've run mine for years without the faceplate with no problems (I've also seen instructions for modifying the faceplate, but never bothered). I bought mine several years ago for around $40 on eBay, a brand new Apple OEM part. I was worried for awhile that the lack of a fan on this card would cause problems, but it hasn't hiccuped once in my years of use. Performance-wise, probably about the same as the 2MX, maybe a bit better, depending on who you ask.

Click to expand...

What an interesting coincidence! I've just recently bought a brand new Radeon 7500 OEM-card on Ebay for 40$ and I'm also from Sweden...

I'm currently using the stock "ATI Rage 128", which is a pretty crappy card but doesn't produce all that much heat. It would be really nice to be able to continue keeping the cube fanless. I just want to doublecheck that I haven't misunderstood your post.

You simply installed the Radeon 7500 and don't use any kind of fan or extra cooling at all, am I right? And you haven't experienced any heatrelated issues at all? It would be pretty sweet with a Radeon 7500 in a fanless cube.

I'm going to buy a thermometer with wireless sensors and place them in the cube to get some before- and after temperatures to compare. I'm particularly interested to see the temp on the graphiccard heatsink.

There is actually some kind of cputemp-sensor on most G4:s, which can be read in linux using 'cat /proc/cpuinfo'. Under heavy load the maxtemp for the cpu is 46-48 C and for the harddrive 51-52 C.

I have a Cube with an original ATI Radeon card in it, running a 22" ACD. I got tired of the Radeon fan noise, so I just disconnected it. It's been running fanless for two years with no problems at all.

skunk said:

I have a Cube with an original ATI Radeon card in it, running a 22" ACD. I got tired of the Radeon fan noise, so I just disconnected it. It's been running fanless for two years with no problems at all.

Click to expand...

A lot of Cubes evidently shipped with the version of this card lacking the fan. I believe Apple offered to replace them in a recall. Not that it really mattered; most of the fanless 32 MB video cards seem to work fine in the Cube. Don't know that I'd want to drive it hard playing games though.

I run a 17" ADC LCD display with the Radeon 7500, no fan on the card. It's been running daily for two years in this configuration. At the same time, I also installed a 1.7 G4 upgrade, which does involve a base fan. This fan does not cool the video card, at least not significantly. I never bothered with any temperature sensing. I figured if the video card was going to fail from heat exhaustion I'd see symptoms of impending failure before it happened -- and the cards are cheap enough to replace.

You might be able to pick up a cheap used CPU upgrade on eBay or somewhere. I understand your reservations about the base fan, but you can get some pretty darned quiet ones. If it's not going to be your main Mac, then it probably doesn't matter.