Upgraded my Cube from a 500MHz to a 1.5GHz!

[gavinstubbs09]

Wanted to say thanks to ctmpkmlec4 for selling me this CPU upgrade he had sitting around.

Anyway, this job was about three hours to rip apart the Cube and install a fan then the processor. I ended up removing 95% of anything attached which was a major pain but it all worked out. This project is a major pain in the ass, and you'll only want to do it once! The nice thing is pretty much every screw is a T9 torx. The worst part was trying to make the fan connector work with the port on the VRM board which unfortunately I broke, not to worry I just tapped into the 12v/ground line on the hard drive/optical drive wire.

Runs great and the startup speed compared to before is quite impressive, even other programs in OS X are much more responsive. TFF is much happier and doesn't lag nearly as much as it used to!

I wish I geekbenched it with the 500MHz but too late now. I will however geekbench it in a bit and compare it to my 466MHz Digital Audio.

 

[ctmpkmlec4]

I'm jealous!

 

[desantii]

Awesome, I love the Cube

 

[bunnspecial]

Very nice, and I'm also jealous

I'll benchmark my 500mhz Cube when it arrives for comparison.

 

[fhall1]

Now you need to max out the RAM!

 

[Altemose]

Sounds like a fun project!

 

[poiihy]

How much heat does that 1.5GHz chipset emit? Can it be used without a fan?

 

[Intell]

A fan must be used for any CPU upgrade in a Cube.

 

[poiihy]

I see. Gavinstubbs what fan are you using there? It looks like it has a metal core or cap on the propellor.

 

[ctmpkmlec4]

I see. Gavinstubbs what fan are you using there? It looks like it has a metal core or cap on the propellor.

It's a Panaflo brand. Can't remember model number, but it's nearly silent.

 

[bunnspecial]

Gavin,

What's the RAM configuration in yours-i.e. the size of sticks that are giving you 768mb?

I want to benchmark my still-stock 500mhz, but want to duplicate your RAM set-up so that the results are as comparable as possible.

 

[jbarley]

.

 

[gavinstubbs09]

Gavin,

What's the RAM configuration in yours-i.e. the size of sticks that are giving you 768mb?

I want to benchmark my still-stock 500mhz, but want to duplicate your RAM set-up so that the results are as comparable as possible.

3x256MB sticks

 

[bunnspecial]

3x256MB sticks

Okay, I don't think I can do that at the moment. Stand by-I'll try to do it on Monday.

 

[bunnspecial]

I found a stash of 256mb RAM sticks so I could duplicate Gavin's set up in an otherwise stock 500mhz Cube.

Here's Geekbench and Xbench.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I have a 1.5 GHz upgrade that I haven't gotten around to throwing in mine yet. I want to figure out how to underclock it to 1 GHz so that it's still reasonable speed, yet draws less power. (I also need to throw my passively cooled, flashed GeForce 6200LE in, and an SSD.)

 

[desantii]

I'll run it on my cube at 1.8ghz to get my score as well

 

[gavinstubbs09]

Thanks for the results bunn

I'll benchmark mine once I get home from my college classes.

-

My Cube loves to create heat, so much that the system will lock up after using it for a bit with the fan running at full speed. I had to let the cube air cool one day for hours on end!

----------

I'll run it on my cube at 1.8ghz to get my score as well

Awesome! I'd love to create a dedicated Cube page on the PowerPC Archive talking about the difference in speeds between 450/500MHz and the various CPU upgrades!

 

[desantii]

854 on a 1.8hhz cube(7447 cpu)

 

[flyrod]

Anyway, this job was about three hours to rip apart the Cube and install a fan...

Which way is that fan pointed?

 

[poiihy]

Which way is that fan pointed?

It's pointed downwards looks like.
Huh I never noticed that before.
It really should be pointed upwards.
All it's doing is sucking air from the top and blowing it out the bottom. The air doesn't flow straight through the heat sink. The fan should be sucking air from the bottom and blowing it straight through to the top.

 

[ctmpkmlec4]

There should be arrows in the outside of the housing to indicate fan rotation and airflow. You want the airflow going upwards.

 

[bunnspecial]

Awesome! I'd love to create a dedicated Cube page on the PowerPC Archive talking about the difference in speeds between 450/500MHz and the various CPU upgrades!

I can benchmark a 450 pretty easily. I also want to redo the 500 with 1.5gb of RAM, as that's what it will have in it for actual use(all my other Cubes have 1.5gb). The RAM amount DOES affect the Geekbench score. Even though Xbench doesn't give a nice "total" number like Geekbench, I do like the fact that you can actually examine individual aspects of performance in their real, measured value.

 

[jbarley]

Just something to add to this thread, my Cube is 1.0 Ghz running off an internal mounted SSD.

GeekBench and XBench
---------------------------------------------------------


Results 45.75
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S165)
Physical RAM 1536 MB
Model PowerMac5,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.00 GHz
Version 7455 (Apollo) v2.1
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 256K @ 500 MHz
L3 Cache 2048K @ 250 MHz
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,Rage128Pro
Drive Type OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD
CPU Test 45.37
GCD Loop 81.03 4.27 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 34.48 819.24 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 114.63 4.57 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 36.08 1.19 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 30.85 5.37 Mops/sec
Thread Test 44.19
Computation 42.99 870.93 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 45.46 1.96 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 25.72
System 29.13
Allocate 84.04 308.63 Kalloc/sec
Fill 30.50 1482.85 MB/sec
Copy 17.15 354.28 MB/sec
Stream 23.02
Copy 25.90 535.00 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 26.24 542.01 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 21.77 463.65 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 19.57 418.56 MB/sec [altivec]

 

[desantii]

If it's running at 1.5ghz it's probably a 7447 with no L3. No point in running it at 1.0ghz when you could get a sonnet 1.0 or 1.2 with 2mb cache. Those run fairly cool

I have a 1.5 GHz upgrade that I haven't gotten around to throwing in mine yet. I want to figure out how to underclock it to 1 GHz so that it's still reasonable speed, yet draws less power. (I also need to throw my passively cooled, flashed GeForce 6200LE in, and an SSD.)