My New eMac - best Mac ever!

[Legacy]

I have been using my newly acquired eMac for the past two days and I must say the Mac system carries on to amaze me!

It only has 256MB of Memory and it actually runs everything so much faster than any Pentium 4 with twice the memory! The Graphics card is great too.

So far my project 'Angel' (the name for my eMac) includes a memory upgrade and possible CPU overclock.

I have purchased a 1GB stick for it to bring it up to 1.25GB which should be more than enough for this baby. but I was wondering by how much I could potentially overclock the G4 inside it. It is currently running at the stock 1.42GHz. Would an overclock to say 1.6GHz help boost performance when I put Leopard on it? How far could I safely go? (1.8GHz?)

I am leaving the stock 80GB hard drive as AFAIK it is 7200rpms anyway. The combo drive is also fine for my needs 🙂

 

[Tarkovsky]

I think lowendmac have guides and cpus to buy but I wouldn't recommend overclocking it. Macs aren't designed with overclocking nor airflow in mind. Wierdly there are also performance issues with overclocking - i/o errors and the like - the sort of errors macs are designed not to have, because the OS and components are designed and selected with the whole machine in mind.

You'd actually get a decent performance boost with a new hard disk - the RPM is only part of the story, the cache, seek time and how much of the space you are using are also very important factors. Drives tend to slow down drastically as they get to around half full.

 

[Luap]

I had a 1ghz eMac which I initially overclocked to 1.33ghz. It made a huge difference to performance. But it would not run for more than an hour or so before it crashed in quite a nasty way. So I reclocked it to 1.2ghz, and it ran just great. 20% speed boost for virtually no cost at all.

eMacs are one of the few Macs that were relatively straightforwards to overclock. But its still no easy task. Just getting inside the thing is a job in itself. Then you have to remove and resolder resistors which are damn near the size of a grain of sand. And im not joking.
Its not a job for the faint hearted, thats for sure.

I've not heard of anyone overclocking a 1.42ghz eMac, only the 800/1ghz ones. But thats not to say it cant be done. Have a google around.
Interesting post here started by the guy that made overclocking eMacs popular:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/53733/