Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Gone Cube Crazy

MagicBoy said:
It's a hackintosh in an old PowerMac case. They ceased to be a PowerMac G5 and G4 cube when you replaced the innards with generic off the shelf PC parts.

Anyway, whatever floats your boat. I appreciate the original hardware for what it is.
Click to expand...
I don't see the difference. I buy old macs and upgrade the internals, OP buys old macs and upgrades the internals. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it's a duck.

redhatcode29 said:
...gutting it and stuffing it with a hack is very much an easy task....compARED to restoring a PPC to its original state.

Given the patience and effort to obtain parts which are no more in production and then putting em up in a piece....is far more an accomplishment ..... the satisfaction in having the restored Mac to boot...
Click to expand...

I agree with the 1st half but not the 2nd half.

In the end an upgraded powermac--especially a g4--is an obsolete dino and unable to even play youtube today.

bunnspecial said:
I have a friend who is building a "portable" gaming rig- or at least portable in the sense that he can take it from his apartment to his parents house without too much hassle. He's using desktop grade components, including an mITX board and a high-end i5.

I texted him the other day to ask how things were going with it, and he responded with a stream of obscenities about how much he hated working with the mITX board.

That's the limit of my experience with them(which really isn't any experience at all) but it didn't leave me with a favorable impression :)
Click to expand...

well you can't fit a high performance gfx card in a G4 cube.
 
ToroidalZeus said:
I don't see the difference. I buy old macs and upgrade the internals, OP buys old macs and upgrades the internals. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it's a duck.
Click to expand...

On that basis, this is a Ferrari then : http://www.mr2kits.co.uk/new-350-cali-kit.html ;)

As soon as you swap the logic board for something non-OEM it ceases to be a PowerMac, and becomes a IBM compatible PC in an old PowerMac chassis.
 
ToroidalZeus said:
In the end an upgraded powermac--especially a g4--is an obsolete dino and unable to even play youtube today.
Click to expand...

That may be your opinion, but I happen to get a lot of enjoyment out of restoring and upgrading old PPC hardware and accomplishing as much as I can with it.

And, I'll repeat this again There's more to working with a computer than playing Youtube videos. With that said, my Cubes can still do it.

well you can't fit a high performance gfx card in a G4 cube.
Click to expand...

I never claimed to do any such thing-I just said I was putting a better graphics card in. I don't think anyone on here will disagree that a GEForce 2MX is a better card than an ATI Rage 128. Both are really long in the tooth now, but the GEForce is still better.

If you want to wreck old Macs, be my guest. It's your time and money. Just remember that it ceases to be a Powermac G4 or G5 when you take the G4 or G5 out of it :)

For myself, I'm going to keep upgrading and playing with them as is, and having a blast doing it. I'm going to use them to get work done, play games of the same vintage as the computers(not the bloated stuff made today, but stuff that is just as fun and runs great on the old computers), and even watching the occasional Youtube video.
 
  • Like
Reactions: barbu
Did you ever get the SSD's installed in your cubes? I've got a 2.5" SSD with 44 to 40 pin adapter that I just suck on the CD plate with some little pieces of velcro.
 
flyrod said:
Did you ever get the SSD's installed in your cubes? I've got a 2.5" SSD with 44 to 40 pin adapter that I just suck on the CD plate with some little pieces of velcro.
Click to expand...

I had one in for a little while. I used an mSATA SSD in a 2.5" 44 pin enclosure. I mounted it using a standard 2.5" to 3.5" bracket along with a 44 pin to 40 pin adapter. I got the computer to boot and run, and it actually returned some impressive Xbench numbers. It maxed at 58mb/s , which is in line with the 8mb/s overhead that I've observed in other systems with this same adapter(i.e. Powerbooks with ATA/100 will max at 92mb/s).

Unfortunately, the system was unstable. I would get a hard freeze after a few minutes in both OS X and OS 9.

Some recent experiments by others with similar problems in Powerbook G3s have indicated that it may be heat related.

In my case, it was right around the time I got my 17" A1139, so I ended up yanking the SSD from the Cube and putting it in the Powerbook.

At one point, I experimented with fitting a standard 2.5" SATA SSD, but there wasn't enough room to fit the adapter.

I've settled on Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 80gb drives as my "go to" Cube drive. They're reasonably fast(at least for an ATA platter drive), fairly quiet, and are, IMO, a good compromise size for the Cube. Drives larger than 128gb need software-based drivers to access the full capacity(which means that the first partition needs to be smaller than 128gb to allow the computer to boot), and honestly if I need that much storage space I'll just use a G4 tower or an external FW.
 
flyrod said:
For the VRM, many people add heatsinks to FETs that get hot, and this seems to help significantly. I have a dual 550MHz cube that has run for years this way.
Click to expand...

I am going to look into that. I lost my previous Cube to an explody VRM, along with the SSD and 1000 MHz G4 :oops:.

bunnspecial said:
The optical drive(DVD) is dead, and I have a message out to the seller as this wasn't disclosed in the listing. After exercising some, it will eject fine, but won't mount any disks at all
Click to expand...

Oh the irony! You must have somehow bought the only Cube that still ejects discs properly! Too bad it can't read... this is the one upgrade i cannot figure out. There are turnkey solutions out there but they are damn pricey.

ToroidalZeus said:
just gut em and hackintosh em
Click to expand...

giphy.gif
 
barbu said:
Oh the irony! You must have somehow bought the only Cube that still ejects discs properly! Too bad it can't read... this is the one upgrade i cannot figure out. There are turnkey solutions out there but they are damn pricey.
Click to expand...

I actually was able to buy a replacement DVD drive for a pretty reasonable price(I think about $40) and it works perfectly. I have a parts iMac G3 DV that I could scavenge one from also.

Interestingly enough, the SuperDrive upgrade is less expensive for computers that already have a CD-RW. My most recently acquired one has a 1.5ghz upgrade(the same upgrade that @ctmpkmlec4 owned, but sold to someone else, installed in the Cube and then sold to me). Since that one really isn't an OS 9 computer(I can probably get it to boot OS 9, but it's not a huge deal as I prefer my 800mhz/1mb L3 for that), I'm probably going to install the 6200 in it when I get around to flashing it. The card is in my "flashing" computer, but I seem to constantly battle with finding the correct version of NVflash to flash a particular card. I think I have the right one, but setting up my "flashing computer" is enough of an ordeal that I just haven't done it.

The 6200 should make it into a good machine for Tiger and Leopard-AFAIK, the 6200 is the only CI-capable card that will work in the 2x slot of the Cube and also physically fit. I have the exact one that Macvidcards recommended, and I think it has 256mb of VRAM.
 
bunnspecial said:
I actually was able to buy a replacement DVD drive for a pretty reasonable price(I think about $40) and it works perfectly. I have a parts iMac G3 DV that I could scavenge one from also.

Interestingly enough, the SuperDrive upgrade is less expensive for computers that already have a CD-RW. My most recently acquired one has a 1.5ghz upgrade(the same upgrade that @ctmpkmlec4 owned, but sold to someone else, installed in the Cube and then sold to me). Since that one really isn't an OS 9 computer(I can probably get it to boot OS 9, but it's not a huge deal as I prefer my 800mhz/1mb L3 for that), I'm probably going to install the 6200 in it when I get around to flashing it. The card is in my "flashing" computer, but I seem to constantly battle with finding the correct version of NVflash to flash a particular card. I think I have the right one, but setting up my "flashing computer" is enough of an ordeal that I just haven't done it.

The 6200 should make it into a good machine for Tiger and Leopard-AFAIK, the 6200 is the only CI-capable card that will work in the 2x slot of the Cube and also physically fit. I have the exact one that Macvidcards recommended, and I think it has 256mb of VRAM.
Click to expand...
I flashed a 6200 XFX for my cube back in the day - a bit of work but it worked very well, it's fanless and much smaller than old-school cards, and very capable. However, i don't use it because i am a sucker for my 20" Cinema Display. For me, it's the only way to Cube :)
 
Time for me to bite heh. As a guy who has hackintoshed many computers (everything from Pentium 4s to Core i7 workstations and gaming laptops) I can say that hackintoshing defo has its flaws... and I really am not a fan of people who gut macs and hackintosh them (there is only so many out there and they kind of lose there charm once there gutted IMO) now I wont go into huge detail on this but Nothing beats a Real Mac no matter how old it is... and thats coming from someone who is currently using a Hackintosh as his main computer... so please toroidalzuse can you please keep out of the PPC forums if all your going to go on about is hackintoshing as this is not the place to do it. also skylake is not even out yet plus it will take skylake Mac to come out for it to have proper support in OS X (Look at haswell E) let me put it this way if some one Took you and ripped out all of your insides (brain organs etc) and put ur skin on a terminator does that make the terminator/your skin you? same thing with gutting a G4/5 and hackintoshing it
 
  • Like
Reactions: barbu
bunnspecial said:
I actually was able to buy a replacement DVD drive for a pretty reasonable price(I think about $40) and it works perfectly. I have a parts iMac G3 DV that I could scavenge one from also.

Interestingly enough, the SuperDrive upgrade is less expensive for computers that already have a CD-RW. My most recently acquired one has a 1.5ghz upgrade(the same upgrade that @ctmpkmlec4 owned, but sold to someone else, installed in the Cube and then sold to me). Since that one really isn't an OS 9 computer(I can probably get it to boot OS 9, but it's not a huge deal as I prefer my 800mhz/1mb L3 for that), I'm probably going to install the 6200 in it when I get around to flashing it. The card is in my "flashing" computer, but I seem to constantly battle with finding the correct version of NVflash to flash a particular card. I think I have the right one, but setting up my "flashing computer" is enough of an ordeal that I just haven't done it.

The 6200 should make it into a good machine for Tiger and Leopard-AFAIK, the 6200 is the only CI-capable card that will work in the 2x slot of the Cube and also physically fit. I have the exact one that Macvidcards recommended, and I think it has 256mb of VRAM.
Click to expand...
I'm glad that CPU ultimately found a good home. Did he send you the base fan, too?
 
On the subject of purchasing and shipping Cubes, we see so many Cubes these days with hairline cracks on the top, where the two mounting points for the internal core are. (see photo).
A lot of people fail to realize the fact that the heavy internal core hangs from these two points, and much like a pendulum will try to swing if moved about violently, such as in shipping. When it tries to swing, something has to give, and in most cases it will be the acrylic outer case.
When readying for shipping more consideration needs to be given to safely supporting this internal core, either by shimming to prevent sideways movement or even releasing the latch mechanism and adding packing material to support the core.
I for one am sure that if this had been known from the beginning, we'd be seeing much less of these classic top-case cracks.
IMG_0205.jpg
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: ctmpkmlec4
flyrod said:
Is this CPU upgrade one of the powerlogix ones with the VRM bypass so the VRM isn't loaded by the CPU?
Click to expand...
I'm almost positive that it is. It has been quite some time since I sold it to Gavin, but it seems like there were two connectors: one plugged into the video card riser, but I'm not sure where the other plugged into.
bunnspecial said:
He sent the whole Cube :)
Click to expand...
Ahhhhhh..... Cube hoarder, you are! :p
 
jbarley said:
On the subject of purchasing and shipping Cubes, we see so many Cubes these days with hairline cracks on the top, where the two mounting points for the internal core are. (see photo).
A lot of people fail to realize the fact that the heavy internal core hangs from these two points, and much like a pendulum will try to swing if moved about violently, such as in shipping. When it tries to swing, something has to give, and in most cases it will be the acrylic outer case.
When readying for shipping more consideration needs to be given to safely supporting this internal core, either by shimming to prevent sideways movement or even releasing the latch mechanism and adding packing material to support the core.
I for one am sure that if this had been known from the beginning, we'd be seeing much less of these classic top-case
cracks.
View attachment 573172
Click to expand...
My spare Cube case looks like that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back