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Overclocking B&W G3 Love

Hmm...

I cant wait personally to get some funds to put some work into my Yikes G4 after seeing that card.

I'm looking at scoring a G4 ZIF on eBay thats faster than the 350 thats OC'ed to 400 in there, like 550 or 600 and OC that to 650 or 700, then getting one of the PNY 5500 PCI cards and flashing it with the Mac BIOS, and putting it alongside my Radeon 7000 PCI, while dropping 2 WD 40GB 7200RPM drives into a RAID, and putting a 1U Socket A heatsink on the CPU. o_O Crazy no?
 
ReanimationLP said:
Hmm...

I cant wait personally to get some funds to put some work into my Yikes G4 after seeing that card.

I'm looking at scoring a G4 ZIF on eBay thats faster than the 350 thats OC'ed to 400 in there, like 550 or 600 and OC that to 650 or 700, then getting one of the PNY 5500 PCI cards and flashing it with the Mac BIOS, and putting it alongside my Radeon 7000 PCI, while dropping 2 WD 40GB 7200RPM drives into a RAID, and putting a 1U Socket A heatsink on the CPU. o_O Crazy no?
Click to expand...
It's not crazy. I just learned though that PCI Extreme will speed up your GUI but your video decoding/encoding will suffer a performance hit. I'm using my Power Mac G3 for watching anime so I need decoding performance. I just bought a Radeon 7000 PCI and a Linksys PCI 802.11g card. I can't wait to go back home and put them in my G3. I'm looking for a 500-600 MHz G3 upgrade. At worst I'll get a 450 and overclock it to 500.
 
Just booted it up, came up perfectly. Now I just gotta get to storage and dig out the hard disk sleds. o_O I was in the middle of working on it when I moved so some of it got seperated from the others. :(
 
ReanimationLP said:
Just booted it up, came up perfectly. Now I just gotta get to storage and dig out the hard disk sleds. o_O I was in the middle of working on it when I moved so some of it got seperated from the others. :(
Click to expand...

Is it running stable at 400 from 350? I have a 350Mhz G4 Yikes on it's way and I'm debating whether to OC it to 400 or not...it's not going to be a main computer and I don't want it to cause any problems. What do you think?
 
Man, overclocking these yikes g4s / b&w G3s seems so easy, I wish I'd have given it a try before I sold mine :rolleyes:
 
ITASOR said:
Is it running stable at 400 from 350? I have a 350Mhz G4 Yikes on it's way and I'm debating whether to OC it to 400 or not...it's not going to be a main computer and I don't want it to cause any problems. What do you think?
Click to expand...
As long as you're not pounding the CPU 24/7 or Folding@Home, 50 Mhz is fine.
 
Eidorian said:
As long as you're not pounding the CPU 24/7 or Folding@Home, 50 Mhz is fine.
Click to expand...

I actually may just leave it at 350...50Mhz is worth messing with it to me. :)
 
ITASOR said:
I actually may just leave it at 350...50Mhz is worth messing with it to me. :)
Click to expand...
I found the extra 50 MHz worth it. At least until I can get an faster G3 for it. 1 GHz seems a bit much and 450 MHz stock OC'ed to 500 too little.

Ebay is crawling with 450 Mhz G3's but the lowest I've seen on the high end is 800 MHz and their priced get inflated in bidding. It's almost worth just coughing up the $199 for the 1 GHz chip sometimes.
 
ReanimationLP said:
Hmm...

I cant wait personally to get some funds to put some work into my Yikes G4 after seeing that card.

I'm looking at scoring a G4 ZIF on eBay thats faster than the 350 thats OC'ed to 400 in there, like 550 or 600 and OC that to 650 or 700, then getting one of the PNY 5500 PCI cards and flashing it with the Mac BIOS, and putting it alongside my Radeon 7000 PCI, while dropping 2 WD 40GB 7200RPM drives into a RAID, and putting a 1U Socket A heatsink on the CPU. o_O Crazy no?
Click to expand...

well, it's a hobby. does a socket a heatsink really fit correctly on whatever zif socket is in these yosemite/yikes boards?
 
Eidorian said:
Ebay a Rev. B heatsink or buy one of those bigger ones that works. :D
Click to expand...

I spent a bit of time looking and measuring to see if that socket A Artic fan and heatsink would fit, but there's no way it would've cleared the Zip drive bay.

So I picked up a 50mm cooling this week, and mounted it to the heatsink, wired to the main cooling fan and it seems to do the trick just dandy. :D

I'll be picking up some decent thermal grease this week to further aid cooling as well. :)

ITASOR said:
Is it running stable at 400 from 350? I have a 350Mhz G4 Yikes on it's way and I'm debating whether to OC it to 400 or not...it's not going to be a main computer and I don't want it to cause any problems. What do you think?
Click to expand...

A 350MHz G4 is my next buy... :D

First thing I'll be doing is bumping it to 400MHz... now as far as I remember, and a quick check on Wiki seems to confirm this, but the 350's were actually supposed to be 400's but after the 500Mhz yield issues Apple under clocked them all by 50MHz from 400, 450, 500 to 350, 400, 450 respectively.

So a rock solid 400MHz should be easy to sneak out of a 350, and with added cooling you might be able to tease that up to stable 450. I know I will be. ;) (coming from someone who's teased 400MHz from a 300MHz G3) :D
 
Has anyone had success with DIVX on the B&W? I just acquired a 450mhz version with the Radeon 7000, and DIVX playback is choppy with VLC. Is there insufficient horsepower for the DIVX codec?
 
Ashtangi said:
Has anyone had success with DIVX on the B&W? I just acquired a 450mhz version with the Radeon 7000, and DIVX playback is choppy with VLC. Is there insufficient horsepower for the DIVX codec?
Click to expand...
I've watched .mkv XviD files in VLC just fine on my overclocked 450. Howl's Moving Castle playing seamlessly in fullscreen and windowed.
 
almost divx

Ashtangi said:
Has anyone had success with DIVX on the B&W? I just acquired a 450mhz version with the Radeon 7000, and DIVX playback is choppy with VLC. Is there insufficient horsepower for the DIVX codec?
Click to expand...

I have an over clocked G3 B&W 500 running 10.4.5 and I can barely get it to play Divx videos. It seems to drop about 10-30% of frames no matter how many other processes I eliminate. I think it's the best I'm going to be able to do.

I've tried several different versions of VLC and they all seem to perform the same (including the lastest version)
 
Wow, I have no clue what I'm doing then. I play lots of stuff in VLC just fine. iTunes and Quicktime are worthless for video playback though. Maybe it's my 1 GB of RAM and the fact I don't multitask when playing video?

I'll be selling one of my B&W's so I'll just have my overclocked one soon.
 
Well it looks like I'll be selling my $50 babies and I'll buy myself an iMac G4 from the profits.

It was fun overclocking. :cool:
 
I had a B&W 400 a year ago that i tried overclocking. I successfuly was able to clock it to 450. The only thing was it would crash non stop at that speed. I was never able to succesfully get it to not crash and give the grey please restart screen. I only had the machine for a year before i sold it though. I was fine with it running at 400mhz. Great machine though.
 
trogdor! said:
I had a B&W 400 a year ago that i tried overclocking. I successfuly was able to clock it to 450. The only thing was it would crash non stop at that speed. I was never able to succesfully get it to not crash and give the grey please restart screen. I only had the machine for a year before i sold it though. I was fine with it running at 400mhz. Great machine though.
Click to expand...
Some chips just don't handle overclocking very well. Some on the other hand do.
 
Eidorian said:
I just bought a Radeon 7000 PCI and a Linksys PCI 802.11g card. I can't wait to go back home and put them in my G3.
Click to expand...

How did the Linksys 802.11g card work out? I just overclocked my 350 to 400 and I need to add wireless to it. Does it work out of the box or did you need to do something special for OS X to recognize it?

Thanks
Michael
 
pinetec said:
How did the Linksys 802.11g card work out? I just overclocked my 350 to 400 and I need to add wireless to it. Does it work out of the box or did you need to do something special for OS X to recognize it?

Thanks
Michael
Click to expand...
It worked out just fine under 10.4.3. No special drivers at all. I just plugged it in and instant Airport Extreme.
 
Eidorian said:
It worked out just fine under 10.4.3. No special drivers at all. I just plugged it in and instant Airport Extreme.
Click to expand...

Great, I'll pick one up today.

I've been a Mac user for years but I'm new to the modding side. I went ahead and bumped my b/w up again to 450 today. It was originally a 350 and bumped to 400. What software do you use to monitor the temperatures and do you use any special software to test the overclocking? It seems to be running fine @ 450 but I'm also not putting alot of strain on the cpu.

Thanks
Michael
 
NO NO NooO!

The linksys card Eidorian has, came from me. You cannot just go out and buy one. There is only 1 version which works plug and play and that version stopped production about 2 years ago.

Sonnet sells a compatible (same chipset) no drivers needed. You might also be able to find a used 'broadcom' chipset PCI card on Ebay, but its hit or miss as most folks do not know what they have.

I guarantee if you buy a Linksys card today it will not work!

pinetec said:
Great, I'll pick one up today.

I've been a Mac user for years but I'm new to the modding side. I went ahead and bumped my b/w up again to 450 today. It was originally a 350 and bumped to 400. What software do you use to monitor the temperatures and do you use any special software to test the overclocking? It seems to be running fine @ 450 but I'm also not putting alot of strain on the cpu.

Thanks
Michael
Click to expand...
 
pinetec said:
Great, I'll pick one up today.

I've been a Mac user for years but I'm new to the modding side. I went ahead and bumped my b/w up again to 450 today. It was originally a 350 and bumped to 400. What software do you use to monitor the temperatures and do you use any special software to test the overclocking? It seems to be running fine @ 450 but I'm also not putting alot of strain on the cpu.

Thanks
Michael
Click to expand...
I believe there's Classic software that lets you see the CPU temperature but none for OS X. In addition Classic appears to be more crash prone on an overclocked machine then OS X.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosemite/OC.html

http://www.macmod.com/content/view/533/2/

RGunner said:
The linksys card Eidorian has, came from me. You cannot just go out and buy one. There is only 1 version which works plug and play and that version stopped production about 2 years ago.

Sonnet sells a compatible (same chipset) no drivers needed. You might also be able to find a used 'broadcom' chipset PCI card on Ebay, but its hit or miss as most folks do not know what they have.

I guarantee if you buy a Linksys card today it will not work!
Click to expand...
Yep, I got that special Linksys card with the Broadcom chip. I didn't think it'd be on sale anymore. I got a good deal on it too. :D
 
yea i bought a G3 450mhz cpu off ebay for my Beige G3 AIO and kept it at the stock 66mhz bus speed and clocked the cpu to 466 wich is no biggy heck i can play postal 2 in OS X on my beige G3 AIO that im useing the spec's are in my sig the game is a bit slow but i can play it. return to castle wolfinstine play's great on my AIO in OS 9 and OS X. OS X 10.4 runs great but had a few problems with the internal video shuting off and no cd's or dvd's wanting to mount at all. only would mount when i would reboot with a cd or dvd in the drive but would only work for 10-20 minutes so i just took tiger off and reinstalled 10.2.8 and man jag is slow. i was suprised that tiger ran so fast even on the stock 266mhz cpu. i havent tryed with the new cpu yet but yea cpu's can some times be had off ebay for cheap. i paid a bit less that $50 USD for the CPU. i also bought a yikes G4 cpu and mobo for $40 but i need a case with psu and front board.
 
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