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Finally have an MDD!!

CYB3RBYTE

CYB3RBYTE

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 2, 2014
454
293
Midwest
Greetings! I just bought my first ever PowerMac G4 MDD! I am really happy!

I bought it for $50 off craigslist, and let me tell you, this thing is dirty! It's full of all types of dust bunnies. It is a 1.0 GHZ FW-800 model, with 1GB of RAM (I don't actually know how much RAM it really has yet since I am still installing Leopard), and I put in a 80GB Western Digital Caviar drive that the guy who sold it threw in. I am really happy with this so far.

I may throw in 2GB of RAM, who knows!

When did you all get your first MDD's?
 
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CYB3RBYTE said:
Greetings! I just bought my first ever PowerMac G4 MDD! I am really happy!

I bought it for $50 off craigslist, and let me tell you, this thing is dirty! It's full of all types of dust bunnies. It is a 1.0 GHZ FW-800 model, with 1GB of RAM (I don't actually know how much RAM it really has yet since I am still installing Leopard), and I put in a 80GB Western Digital Caviar drive that the guy who sold it threw in. I am really happy with this so far.

I may throw in 2GB of RAM, who knows! :roll eyes:

When did you all get your first MDD's?
Click to expand...

My MDD was a pig that came home for a simple OS reload and was never returned due to all of the issues with it.
 
My first was a bit of an impulse buy on Ebay. It was a single 1.25(as I understand it the last of the MDDs). That system came with a good install of OS X 10.4 on it, but I've since loaded up with hard drives and actually have every version of OS X it supports installed(10.2 through 10.5) as well as OS 9.

I was a bit unsatisfied with that one(it had some hidden problems) so bought a second from a forum member here-a dual 1ghz. The seller shipped it to me in the original box with most of the original cables, literature, the restore disks(a valuable asset by themselves), and full retail copies of 10.4 and 10.5. It was well worth it for the extras, even though I ended up putting a new PSU in it.

Both of mine are maxed out with 2gb ram. The first one I bought came with a "combo" drive as the shipping drive(DVD-ROM and CD-RW) so I put a DVD drive in the second optical bay. I still need to do this on the other MDD.

Somewhere along the way, I also picked up a second dual 1ghz processor card and heatsink, and have toyed with the idea of upgrading my single 1.25 to dual 1ghz also.

I'm keeping my eyes open for a FW800 model, but am not in a huge hurry and am probably going to hold out for a dual 1.42.
 
Congrats on your first MDD and possibly your first PowerPC Mac! I am happy with my G5 maxed out at 8GB of Ram and hope you will be too with your MDD.
 
OP, I am happy for you but I have never owned a MDD and have never really cared for the design.

I do own a Quicksilver though and that to me is the most beautiful Mac Apple has ever made. But we all have our own likes.

Enjoy your MDD. It's a great Mac!
 
I saw one this past summer at the thrift store... I admit that I payed too much for the guy, but the dual 1.25Ghz spec surprised me, so I thought it would be a cool toy to have. It came with the keyboard, mouse, and 17" LCD Studio Display.

Sure enough, I upgraded it to 2GB with some spare sticks that I had, and I put a second HD in it... I had to forgo that though, as having two was making my system randomly crash for some reason. I really loved using the thing, but it was so noisy. I had only used it some months until getting my PowerMac G5. Then again, it wasn't my main computer, but my G5 still replaces it. It has a nice spot in my collection; if only I had a use for it ATM.
 
repentix said:
Congrats on your first MDD and possibly your first PowerPC Mac! I am happy with my G5 maxed out at 8GB of Ram and hope you will be too with your MDD.
Click to expand...

Thanks everyone! This is definitely not my first PPC Mac, or PowerMac for that matter (the QuickSilver is now off to the side for a little while;)). However it's just so cool. It also seems to handle Leopard faster since I just installed it.

----------

I've only been using it for four hours, but the noise hasn't been a huge issue. It's actually quieter than my QS, believe it or not! My QS always has a speaker issue, where after it plays a noise it stays on with white noise for at least 3 minutes afterward.

For some reason, the combo drive doesn't want to work :(. Guess that's the first thing to be replaced, then RAM, then maybe a secondary HD.

I already have an Apple ATI Radeon 9600XT coming for me in the mail! I just have to mod it for my 17" Cinema Display!
 
I bought mine around 2003 or so. The Radeon 9000Pro that came with it was faulty so Apple swapped it with a GeForce Ti4600.
I still have this machine too.
 
The MDD is a very nice machine- you are really going to joy it and the cult that follows owning a PowerMac :). I remember my first PowerPC... I bought an iBook G3 for about $15 off of ebay, just to "try" Mac OS X and see how it was... and I absolutley loved it. I am very lucky to now have built my own hackintosh, and have a PowerMac G5 (DP 2.5 w/ 6 GB of Ram).
 
UPDATE: The combo drive is now working, surprisingly. For some reason it would not read my install disks (Tiger or Leopard) but now after I put Leopard on the machine it seems to be able to read my iWork 09' disk just fine. Anyone have any suggestions as to why this may be?

Also, can the processor in this Mac be swapped out for a dual 1.42 GHZ one? I know I would probably have to get a different heat sink.

My plan for this machine is to try to upgrade it to the limit, so I can finally have a really nice G4 machine, since my Quicksilver is basically at it's upgradable limits.

I maybe would be willing to try overclocking as well, however I don't know much about it on G4's.
 
CYB3RBYTE said:
Also, can the processor in this Mac be swapped out for a dual 1.42 GHZ one? I know I would probably have to get a different heat sink.
Click to expand...

You can, but you would have to modify the logic board so that the frontside bus runs at 167 MHz instead of 133 MHz, as the single 1.0GHz FW800 model has the slower FSB. Unless you modify the board, a faster CPU will only run at about 80% of its clock speed (if it works at all). I did exactly this with my MDD. Instructions can be found at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1708627/

If you go for the dual 1.42 then I recommend getting the copper heatsink, but if you stick below that you can use the stock heatsink providing you enable nap mode using the CHUD tools.
 
While I would love to put a 1.33GHZ XServe CPU in my machine, I am a little afraid to remove any resistors and such from a logic board.

Is overclocking an option? I have seen it before in a Dual 1.42 that was overclocked to 1.5GHZ, but I don't know if it is possible with my current processor and FSB speed.
 
Overclocking is possible on these machines (I haven't tried it though) however it still involves soldering, as to my knowledge there is no software overclock.

Without modifying anything, the only two upgrade paths for the CPU would be to either a dual 867 MHz CPU module (provides a noticable improvement in performance; pretty cheap) or one of the aftermarket Sonnet etc. CPU upgrades (nearly impossible to track down, come up on eBay very rarely and sell for a lot; however they offer vastly improved performance, especially the dual 1.8 GHz module)
 
The CPU upgrades for the MDD models are the Sonnet MDX upgrades. They often go for $350+ used. MDD's over overclock very well. They already run hot and their L3 cache can easily get burnt out with faster speeds. Without the L3 cache, they loose a lot of their perceived speed.
 
I purchased my FW800 locally for $60 about four months ago. It's the Dual 1.25 GHz with the superdrive. The original superdrive would open automatically on boot-up, so I replaced it with the superdrive from a G5. Now it has two G5 superdrives (just because), a 250 GB hard drive installed with 10.4.11, and 2 GB of memory. I recently swapped the noisy Delta fan for a comparable Panaflo. Luckily, I haven't had issues with the PSU other than its noisy fans. I noticed these MDDs used either a Samsung or AcBel PSU. Anyone know if there are any differences in reliability between the two?
 
I've been doing some digging, and I think I won't probably overclock this machine, especially with their sometimes random reliability problems.

As far as power supplies go, what I have heard is that the Samsung ones are generally the worst, and that the AcBel is much better and sometimes even quieter.
 
I just pulled an old MDD out of the closet to test out a 20" Apple Cinema Display (ADC) and I was amazed how fast that beast booted. It was ready at the desktop before I could blink. My Intel iMac isn't nearly that fast booting. It's a dual 867 running 10.5.x. Impressive.
 
xbpr said:
I just pulled an old MDD out of the closet to test out a 20" Apple Cinema Display (ADC) and I was amazed how fast that beast booted. It was ready at the desktop before I could blink. My Intel iMac isn't nearly that fast booting. It's a dual 867 running 10.5.x. Impressive.
Click to expand...



The funny part is that the MDD has a 5400 or 7200 RPM hard drive and some of them boot nearly as fast as systems with SSDs. If you don't have an SSD in modern versions of OS X it really does feel slow post-Mountain Lion.
 
Altemose said:
The funny part is that the MDD has a 5400 or 7200 RPM hard drive and some of them boot nearly as fast as systems with SSDs. If you don't have an SSD in modern versions of OS X it really does feel slow post-Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...

My Macbook running Yosemite feels like it takes all day to boot up. I've not timed it, but would guess that it's close to 2 minutes from the time I hit the power button to the time the desktop appears, and then probably another 30 seconds or so before it's ready to go.

I rarely turn off my Macbook Pro(it's been running 20 days per iStat at the moment, and I generally go 30-40 days between restarts), but recall that it takes a fair bit of time to boot up as well.

The only truly slow boot I've ever experienced on a PowerPC system was the one time I booted my TiBook into Leopard via an external USB HDD. That took probably 5 minutes. All of my others are generally under 1 minute from the time I hit the power button to the time they're ready to go.
 
bunnspecial said:
My Macbook running Yosemite feels like it takes all day to boot up. I've not timed it, but would guess that it's close to 2 minutes from the time I hit the power button to the time the desktop appears, and then probably another 30 seconds or so before it's ready to go.

I rarely turn off my Macbook Pro(it's been running 20 days per iStat at the moment, and I generally go 30-40 days between restarts), but recall that it takes a fair bit of time to boot up as well.

The only truly slow boot I've ever experienced on a PowerPC system was the one time I booted my TiBook into Leopard via an external USB HDD. That took probably 5 minutes. All of my others are generally under 1 minute from the time I hit the power button to the time they're ready to go.
Click to expand...



It is the progressive movement from lighter operating systems on older hardware to heavier operating systems on newer hardware. If you compare a computer shipped in 2004 with Windows XP to a brand new computer shipped today with Windows 8.1 both with fresh installs and using regular hard drives they probably will have similar perceived speeds. Granted, some hardware like GPUs and SSDs make all of the difference, but for the basic set of core uses (Office, basic browsing, music) that people use computers for, the difference isn't that far apart. To put it into perspective, I have a PowerBook G4 that starts up in about 45-50 seconds to a fully booted Leopard desktop. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro (when it had a hard drive instead of SSD) took longer when running Mavericks (about 1 minute).
 
upgraded lately !:apple:


Thanks to you !

harrymatic said:
You can, but you would have to modify the logic board so that the frontside bus runs at 167 MHz instead of 133 MHz, as the single 1.0GHz FW800 model has the slower FSB. Unless you modify the board, a faster CPU will only run at about 80% of its clock speed (if it works at all). I did exactly this with my MDD. Instructions can be found at
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1708627/
Click to expand...
If you go for the dual 1.42 then I recommend getting the copper heatsink, but if you stick below that you can use the stock heatsink providing you enable nap mode using the CHUD tools.
Click to expand...
 

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