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repairedCheese

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 13, 2020
654
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Yes, I know, these are rarely machines that ever see major upgrades, but I've been on the warpath to have the best one of these impressive machines as I can get, and they simply do not sell what I'm looking for most of the time. So I made it myself.
1599120997525.png

Now, you might be wondering, what about this is upgraded? Well, when I got the system, it wasn't a dual 1.25 GHz system. But, with the help of @r6mile I was able to get my hands on a Dual 1.25 G4 board. This did start out as a single 1.25 GHz system, and you my be wondering "why did you feel the need to upgrade that?" Well, for one, most of the eBay sales cost about the same, so I figured, if I can't get what I really want, why not aim high? And for another, the single 1.25 GHz G4 didn't feel like enough on Leopard. Honestly, I kind of hoped it would.

However, the dual feels a lot better. The system actually has a chance to idle. Even Leopard Webkit doesn't eat all of the cpu, all the time. What doesn't surprise me is that the system runs warmer. The single ran at a cool 45c, while the dual, a slightly warmer 56c. From what I've been able to gather, this is an ok temperature for this system, but if I ever do get that dual 1.42 GHz board, I'll probably want the coper heat sink to go with it.

But at the end of the day, while this is just a "feeling" test right now, it already feels faster in the most demanding operating system I have to offer it. It really does seem like the best way to get a better experience with a PowerPC Mac at this point is to use a faster processor, or throw more cores at it.

Also, minor note, from what I've been able to gather, this 1.25 GHz dual board was probably from a FW 400 model, making it quite at home in this one.

Another note, there's almost no documentation on how to do this kind of swap, the best I was able to find was a comment on iFixit and even it was only partially complete. That probably has to do with the fact that there was almost no aftermarket cpu upgrades for the G4 MDD.
 
Lucky you... My Dual 1 GHz came in yesterday (many thanks again to @r6mile - was going to update you after it was installed), and I just got around to doing the swap tonight.

The machine turns on, the chime is missing, and the fans go full speed about 10 seconds in. Reseating the daughtercard and applying slightly more paste made no difference, and neither does even removing the RAM. Resetting the PMU and removing the PRAM battery offers no change either. :(

The power button light went out after turning it on the second time, although I am moderately sure this is just the front panel board being irritable again.
 
Lucky you... My Dual 1 GHz came in yesterday (many thanks again to @r6mile - was going to update you after it was installed), and I just got around to doing the swap tonight.

The machine turns on, the chime is missing, and the fans go full speed about 10 seconds in. Reseating the daughtercard and applying slightly more paste made no difference, and neither does even removing the RAM. :(
That is certainly unfortunate, I guess I'm going to have to count my blessings that this worked out as well as it did for me. It didn't actually boot at first, but this system has always struggled with its ram, since I got it, and once I reseated one particular stick a couple times, I got it to boot, detect the right amount of ram, and to close.

Seems like, when it works, it just works. It makes sense, these systems were probably made to support official parts from the get go.
 
1599126124181.png

And now I know just why this system feels so much more responsive now.

I have CHUD installed and use CPU nap, the idle temps are around 36*C, reaching 49*C under heavy load, ambient temp is around 22*C
Any chance you could share more about that? I'd love to see the cpu run cooler.
 
Lucky you... My Dual 1 GHz came in yesterday (many thanks again to @r6mile - was going to update you after it was installed), and I just got around to doing the swap tonight.

The machine turns on, the chime is missing, and the fans go full speed about 10 seconds in. Reseating the daughtercard and applying slightly more paste made no difference, and neither does even removing the RAM. Resetting the PMU and removing the PRAM battery offers no change either. :(

The power button light went out after turning it on the second time, although I am moderately sure this is just the front panel board being irritable again.


Mine has done that after swapping the cpu a couple of times, retry seat the cpu and ide cable connections fixed it for me
 
but I've been on the warpath to have the best one of these impressive machines as I can get
And so was I, until overclocking killed it. One day I'll get another and maybe make a watercooling loop inside it cooling both the CPUs and GPU. Also I think @JoyBed will always have the best MDD here with his modded dual 7457 CPU card.
 
And so was I, until overclocking killed it. One day I'll get another and maybe make a watercooling loop inside it cooling both the CPUs and GPU. Also I think @JoyBed will always have the best MDD here with his modded dual 7457 CPU card.
This is why I don't have plans on overclocking mine. I don't really have the skills, and I don't want a dead system after all this effort. And I certainly don't want all the effort that goes into water cooling. I realize that considering the heat these things give off, it tends to make more sense, but I'd rather pass.

And certainly, there are better G4 systems out there, but not many, and I doubt most of them are currently being used.
 
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I praise the MDDs a lot, but these machines are underrated in various ways.
about.jpg

I'm writing this via tenfourfox, playing a music video with mplayer, a few apps in background, my CPU temp is 36°C. I have a copper heatsink, various airflow adjustments, non-stock fans and the noise level is similar (possibly lower) to a stock quicksilver.

This is my daily driver. It replaced a dual 1.6ghz 7447 Quicksilver, and it performs noticeably better, particularly in multitasking contexts.

Of course they have their issues. They just need a bit of love.
 
Mine has done that after swapping the cpu a couple of times, retry seat the cpu and ide cable connections fixed it for me

No luck. All the pins are straight, and it works fine when the original SP 1.25 is in. Every time the 1.0 is in though, no matter how many times reseated, it won't boot.
 
No luck. All the pins are straight, and it works fine when the original SP 1.25 is in.

Is it a 166Mhz dual or a 133MHz dual? If the SP 1.25GHz works, then I'm guessing your machine is 167MHz, and you might need to adjust the CPU jumpers. This guy has a good description:

 
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Is it a 166Mhz dual or a 133MHz dual? If the SP 1.25GHz works, then I'm guessing your machine is 167MHz, and you might need to adjust the CPU jumpers. This guy has a good description:


Verifying its resistors, it is a 167 MHz dual, most likely from https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powermac_g4_1.0_dp_mdd.html.

My machine is an MDD 2003, which is pretty much the same as the aforementioned model anyway, sans CPU.
 
@XaPHER All two DIMMs are PC2700 1 GB sticks that work beautifully with the 1.25. As previously mentioned, the boot behavior does not change when they are removed.

As there is nothing to lose with this card at this point, I started the machine without the CPU heatsink installed, and observed that from the daughtercard sticker side, the right CPU gets hot as expected (but not to critical levels), while the left one remains cool. Is this normal behavior during initialization, or might the left one be dead and this is what the machine is complaining of?
 
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Whoops, read one of your messages backwards. Only *CPU A* on the board is enabled until a kernel enables B, so the heat observation makes sense. I've never had this kind of issue upgrading my FW800 and 2003. Can't say I own any 2x1ghz board, but it might just be toast.
 
A dual 1.25 MDD should be around 1200-1300.
That is simply not the case when I started looking through the scores.
This is me, a solid 1080.
Funny enough, I live in the neighborhood of an iMac G5.
Someone else also has a dual 1.25Ghz G4 MDD and we're nearly identical.
And they weren't kidding when they said a low end G5 was around 1000, I was surprised to see a SP 1.6 GHz G5 on here recently.
Turns out if you give an iMac G4 a fast enough cpu, you can also get something similar.

What's fascinating is that you can absolutely beat these scores with something older.
Dual processor, 1.8 GHz, it's able to outdo the 1.25 GHz Dual MDD, but look how much faster it has to go to get that kind of lead.

And the funny thing is, Apple never wanted fans on their cpu heatsinks. The last x86 cpu I had that didn't have a fan on its heatsink was a 486, and even that got replaced with one that had a fan. Apple's been shooting themselves in the foot about cooling for such a long time, and it's not just a recent problem. Imagine how much faster these stock G4 cpus could have been with better coolers, and I mean all of them.
 
Sorry... I checked with my buddy, as I borrowed his MDD for a few weeks years ago, and it's actually a dual 1.42. I remembered it as a dual 1.25 for some reason. Anyway, I remember getting 1200+ in GB 2.
 
Sorry... I checked my my buddy, as I borrowed his MDD for a few weeks years ago, and it's actually a dual 1.42. I remembered it as a dual 1.25 for some reason. Anyway, I remember getting 1200+ in GB 2.
And I mean, it doesn't mean I don't want to end up with a dual 1.42. But as much as +200 on GB2 seems like a lot, when you start comparing the scores to Powermac G5 systems on the list, you get things like:
I actually have one of these, the dual processor and dual core 2 Ghz G5 systems simply lap a 1.24 dual MDD G4, with a 1909.
And then there's stuff like the Quad. 3381 really sounds nuts, huh?

Of course, for me, the problem is, neither of these can boot OS 9, and since I already had my G5, if I was going to get a G4, what exactly did I need it to do to justify it in my collection? The simple answer is "something a G5 can't do" and that something is Mac OS 9. It's also something my Ryzen 3600 desktop can't do, at least not particularly well.
And this bad boy gets a 17785. But I'm over having fun with what was basically a dream machine at one point in my life, and even if the classic Mac OS can be really stupid sometimes (like how are OS 9 drivers a thing, and how are they so easy to break, and how is it possible that once you break them in a hard drive, you have to reformat the drive to fix it?) it's been really, really fun.
 
My current fastest system. My gaming PC.

That's the thing, though. At this point, cpu doesn't matter nearly as much as it use to. Even with my MDD, if I put a better gpu into it, say a Radeon 9600, I could, at least, try to play newer games. They still wouldn't run very well, but they would probably run, if slowly. The Radeon 9000 Pro inside of it is staying there for the Mac OS 9 support, and I'd rather try my chances getting linux to work with that card than the last nVidia card they made that supported OS 9.

And besides, you could put a cpu a good deal more powerful into that computer. That's the great thing about having upgrade options, sometimes there's a lot of room to go up. And with a decent gpu? Well, you might not be playing 4k60 at max settings in most new games, but there's no reason you can't have a good time at medium settings at 1080p. That's probably true with the cpu that's in it already, too.
 
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