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powerbook g4 getting quite hot after ssd swap HELP!

B

boneskid1

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 19, 2012
95
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as the title says i put a 60gb ssd in my powerbook g4 and it is so much quieter and it is just that much quicker than the old deceased hdd, but alas there is one down fall............ now that it draws less power the fans literally never kick in. even when i watch a video or have quite a few tabs and windows open. i looked it up online and i am in a gray area really as not many have this issue. i figure i need to change the temp. at which the fans kick in, but how to i go about doing this? is there a command i can put into terminal to gain acess or do i need find it within finder.

if you can help it would be great. this thing is actually getting hot enough now to where i can feel the heat through my desk.

Thanks,
Boneskid1
 
Do a Google search for G4Fan Control. Your mileage may vary. I've never got it to work for me and the dev is completely non-responsive to questions.

Other than the fans bothering you don't worry too much about heat. Your Mac will go into thermal shutdown (it'll just switch off, like a light switch) before anything can be damaged.

You may want to install iStat Menus or MenuMeters to get a sense of what's going on.
 
Yeah it would be good to know the exact temps. My iBook reports specified upper limit for most items, if temps are constantly 20-30C lower than specified upper limit I think there is no reason to worry.

Here is my iBook's temps, the machine has been powered on about 1h and a half maybe:

http://aijaa.com/lPG1Sc

My hard disk temp might be bit too high, but I have recently disassembled the whole machine and there was no dust in sight so in my case I think there is not much I can do.
 
Fan control usually does the job but instead of stressing the aging/discontinued heatsink fan, you could use a silent cooling pad to help as the PowerBook G4 design was to use the case as a giant heatsink--average peak temp of a 12-15" case is about ~100-120F & CPU ~60-65C under sustained load(RC5-72/Photoshop batch convert of 500-1000 photos). Even the unibody MBPs become fairly toasty.

iBook G3/G4 I have no idea what the safe peak temps are, considering all the early 500mhz-900mhz suffered BGA separation issues of the Radeon GPU... I'd be afraid to put much sustained load on 'em, a cooling pad w/two 120mm fans would be a wise idea.

My old 12" PBG4 drops 15 degrees when sitting on a cheap Targus dual fan cooling pad(much quieter than raising the PBs' fan speed) and has been useful during video playback. Since most modern sites peg the heck out of the CPU due Flash/Shockwave not supporting GPU acceleration, using NoScript and a few other browser add-ons trim the amount of ad "fluff" from loading on the net.
 
i will give the cooling pad a try, yes it would be a bad idea at this point to stress the stock fans and burn 'em up
thanks,
Boneskid1
 
Fan control

Your not going to stress the fans with fan control, but the g4 was not made to have no heat from the hard drive area, so either find the sensor and move it to a chip on the motherboard or use fan control.

Too much heat buildup on the motherboard because it senses no heat from the hard drive is not good.
 
how do i go about moving the sensor?

i will go check ifiixt right now so i can see where it is but....... idk that seems odd.
 
boneskid1 said:
as the title says i put a 60gb ssd in my powerbook g4 and it is so much quieter and it is just that much quicker than the old deceased hdd, but alas there is one down fall............ now that it draws less power the fans literally never kick in. even when i watch a video or have quite a few tabs and windows open. i looked it up online and i am in a gray area really as not many have this issue. i figure i need to change the temp. at which the fans kick in, but how to i go about doing this? is there a command i can put into terminal to gain acess or do i need find it within finder.

if you can help it would be great. this thing is actually getting hot enough now to where i can feel the heat through my desk.

Thanks,
Boneskid1
Click to expand...

Hello, and congrats on the update.

I've yet to install an SSD on a 15"PB (done two 12" and a 17"), but I've yet to encounter anything like that. In stead, I've experienced that the kicking in of fans (say on a 12") becomes increasingly annoying as the machine is otherwise 100% silent.

1st step is to get some stats on those temps. My personal favorite is Temperature Monitor

Take those temps, and get back to us.

RGDS,
 
alright so i went ahead and tried out istat menus because thats what the g4 had on it when i first got it, but it must have been an old version because it kept causing my g4 to crash and freeze so after all the resets possible and a uninstall of istat it is working fine again. but i discovered some temps. while it was running and working properly. at idle it claimed to be running at about 110 to 120 degrees F, and when i had a browser and a few tabs open it said 130 or so. Which compared to how it actually felt in my lap was way off, it seemed quite a few degrees cooler.

and believe it or not it was not that hot, i installed g4 fan control and opened it, it claimed the temp was roughly 40 or so degrees Celsius (give or take a few degrees as it goes by the 3 sensors) which is only 104 degrees F so as a test i brought down the temp at which the sensors kick the fans in and within like 2 mins or so the powerbook was much cooler than before. now i just need to test and see if i can get the settings to stay after a reboot




Edit:
also i am thinking about just keeping the powerbook and selling my macbook and nexus 7
but i need a new battery for the powerbook if am going to do this.
would it be better for me to get a newpower battery from owc or should i find a cheaper chinese knockoff

i am in the same boat with my ac adapter, my dog thought it would be nice to chew up the cable on the oem apple adapter so a knockoff was purchased but it is not near the quality of the apple one. for one reason it the battery goes completely dead it takes like 15 mins of charging before i can turn it on where as with the apple one it will come right up even if it is all the way dead.



hmmmm i just tried the temperature monitor and it will not stop freezing on me
 
Last edited:
OWC/Newertech batteries are good. I've also used freshbattery.com in the past. I got an extended battery from them for my old TiBook/400 and it refuses to die. My son gets killer battery life on his 1Ghz TiBook and I can barely go 3 minutes, LOL!

As to adapters. I buy exclusively from Mac-Pro.com. They are a bit more pricey than your average $10 eBay China adapter but they last forever. The only reason I keep having to go back to them is that someone ends up damaging the end of the connector in some way.
 
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