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Speed up Emac 700mhz?

untypoed

untypoed

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 22, 2010
87
1
I've been looking for ways to speed up the Emac without overclocking.. since I have no idea how to overclock. I have OSX 10.4.11, and I have been trying to get OSX Panther to install recently because Tiger is a little slow. It just won't boot the CD. I don't know why. The OSX Tiger CD was able to boot, but not Panther, even though the Emac was made before Panther. (I mention this because I hear that you cant install an OS older than the Mac) Maybe the Emac is slightly newer than the Panther discs I've been using.

I am currently running Safari on my Emac, since Firefox is slow. It's a shame, since Firefox is my favorite web browser. My Emac is running on 768 MB of RAM..

I would love to speed up this computer. I'm going to get some RAM soon, but I have some doubt that this will help much.
 
Try Low End Mac as a source of upgrade info. Some specific articles:

http://new.lowendmac.com/ed/packer/08jp/external-emac-upgrades.html
http://new.lowendmac.com/imacs/emac-index.html


As for OS:
eMacs natively boot Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X beginning with OS X 10.1.4. With the exception of some non-SuperDrive-equipped 1 GHz units, models 1 GHz and faster can not boot OS 9, while eMacs slower than 867 MHz do not officially support 10.5. No model of eMac can run OS X 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") or higher, because support for PowerPC-based Macs has been dropped.
Click to expand...
 
You can't do much without overclocking this eMac. All available upgrades: more RAM, faster HDD - marginal speed up, but always better than nothing. At least Tiger should run better than today.
Overclocking is quite easy, if you got soldering skills ofc.
All about OC'ing eMac: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/53733/ - in first post is link to step by step guide by lbodnar.
 
The overclocking isn't hard it's dealing with the CRT, and possibly getting seriously injured that makes it hard.

I would leave it be, maybe add some ram to it if you can pick it up cheap.


What is running slow on it, that you are trying to remedy?
 
going fast depends on the system.

666sheep said:
It could be dangerous but it depends on you ;)
Click to expand...


that's no joke. the CRT needs to be discharged before doing anything else. most CRTs will retain a charge in the 15K volt range for several days. will really ruin your day....


that said, two things to add to the thread. i joined just after the lbodnars original post and have been overclocking g4 things before/after and the original 700mhz systems would not go much faster without problems. the 800/1000mhz systems were better, the 1.25 and 1.42 would jump up a clock or two with no problems at all. i've overclocked a crap load of 1.25 g4 mini systems to 1.5 with no problems, and they were based on the same logic board/system layout. just my experience based on lots of moved jumpers.

if the 700 was mine, i would either max out the ram and add a fast hard drive, or sell the system and look for a 1.25/1.42 system on the cheap. best of luck.
 
4JNA said:
that's no joke. the CRT needs to be discharged before doing anything else. most CRTs will retain a charge in the 15K volt range for several days. will really ruin your day....
Click to expand...

True, but if it will be discharged properly (not so hard to do) it will be safe.

Sure, it would be better to play with 800+ eMac (1.42 is the best because it uses 7447 CPU). But if OP will know what he's doing, he could bump 700 MHz to stable 900 MHz, which is about 25% speed increase and it's costless.
OP, if you don't feel skilled enough to do it, I agree with 4JNA that selling 700 and looking for 1.25/1.42 would be best option.
 
overclocking such an old cpu isn't going to amount to much, especially when viewing modern web content because its not the speed its the instruction sets and that CPU is old.

I would max out the RAM (only will be 1GB) and run tiger, you can try Leopard but, but you're not going to be able to get this puppy much faster than it is now.
 
Define "faster".

All machines of this age are going to be a little slow. My iMac has similar specs to your eMac, and sometimes it needs a few seconds to catch up, but otherwise seems to run well enough. It is blown into the weeds by the wife's MacBook in all ways you can measure, but it depends on what you're doing as to whether it's important. A 700Mhz G4 is never going to have the guts to process scads of RAW images out of my Nikon, for instance. That kind of power is only going to be had by a big G5 tower, or an Intel Mac. It's also not going to be able to do web video, because most of that is Flash or MPEG4 compressed, both of which is processor intensive to decode.

I agree with the whole "sell it and get something faster" idea. You could mess around and overclock the machine, but if you don't succeed, at best you've still got a slow eMac, or at worst, you have a busted eMac or a trip to the hospital after frying yourself on the CRT.
 
I have a 1.25ghz emac and opened it up ton of times. Just don't touch the crt stuff. I would have overclocked mine but I don't need to since it's fast. if mac os x isn't important to you, try linux.
 
Well, Flash is something I would really like to fix. It's always so laggy and slow. My Hackintosh Laptop's screen is crapping out on me, (I can't see a thing.. It's too dark.. tried many things to fix it, but its nothing with the settings. It happened after I left it charged all night) and I don't know how to make it detect an external monitor at the Chameleon bootloader so I'm stuck with this Emac until I fix it..

Edit: Fixed Hackintosh. Would still like faster Emac.
 
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