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Where are all the ZIF's?

DearthnVader

DearthnVader

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Original poster
Dec 17, 2015
2,207
6,395
Red Springs, NC
So in our eternal quest to make all things PCI faster, I just received a G4 Yikes Logic Board.

I've got a 66Mhz compatible PCI to PCI-E adaptor and a GeForce 7800GT as well as a Radeon X1950XT already flashed and working and nearly ready to crank out some benchmarks.

What I do not have is a good CPU upgrade to push some data at the GFX cards so we can know what the 66MHz PCI in the Yikes can really do.

I do have a 400Mhz 7400 v2.6 that clocks and is stable at 450MHz, but I really need one of the higher end ZIF upgrades. Trouble is pretty much all the G4 ZIFs have evaporated on eBay, even just the stock 400-450MHz ones.

From time to time I see the 1GHz ZIFs on eBay commanding $800 or more, but that is really more than I can put out for this testing.

So does anyone have one of the higher clocked G3 or G4 upgrades for the ZIF machines they'd be willing to sell reasonable or maybe just put it out on loan to me for this test?

I don't really plan on keeping the Yikes in my collection as it's not a full Mac, just a logic board and I was just going to do the old PC ATX thing to it on a workbench setup for this testing. So if anyone wanted to do a loaner, I'd be willing to gift them the Yikes logic board when I return their CPU.

I really don't know what happened to all the ZIF upgrades, if they just got tossed or recycled, or if there never really were that many sold because for the price you could just get a G4 AGP and the much cheaper upgrades for those models.

Anyone want to opine on what happed to all the ZIF's?

Is one person holding them, sitting on a goldmine of ZIFs waiting to cash in, or is it just collectors don't want to part with them?
 
Collectors have been buying them up for years...and unfortunately a lot of them were e-waste a decade ago.
 
GMShadow said:
Collectors have been buying them up for years...and unfortunately a lot of them were e-waste a decade ago.
Click to expand...
That's what I was thinking too, that e-waste ate most of them. I mean for a time you could not give away one of this systems, upgraded or not, and many of them may have ended up scrapped when the Flash player stopped supporting PPC.

Fun how that works, Adobe's dominance in web based video then evaporated when they could not get on the iPhone.

I know I gave away my G5 because it was too slow to play much web based video in 2009.

Old tech working in cycles like that, fist the price goes so low that it isn't worth the cost of shipping, then people junk them, then people get nostalgic and the demand starts to go up until the supply can't feed it and we get prices in that stratosphere.

It's really just the CPU upgrades commanding high prices, tho people my ask a lot on eBay for the Mac's themselves, they don't really sell for all that much.

Never were CPU upgrades for the G5's and I don't know if anyone ever figured how to OC them or even swap the 2.5-2.7GHz into compatible logic boards and still have the BUS run at the speeds needed for the CPUs.

I know a few people did swaps and the fans went into snow blower mode, but I think the just ran at whatever bus speed the old CPU ran at?

CPU's are cheap to ship, even logic boards, but 40+ pound Macs, not so much.
 
These days your best bet to find a cheap one is buying systems locally - and those are long odds. Anyone selling something on eBay with the insides exposed, others will see the upgrade and bid accordingly.
 
GMShadow said:
These days your best bet to find a cheap one is buying systems locally - and those are long odds. Anyone selling something on eBay with the insides exposed, others will see the upgrade and bid accordingly.
Click to expand...
Don't see a lot of the Yike, B&W, or Beiges local, I think I bought the only one I ever saw. Lots of G5's a a few G4 AGP style.

Sad these old Mac's end that way, but I know a lot of the E-Waste got shipped overseas and some people dig through the scrap heaps and resell what they find.

I was hoping to get an XPC100 that way, but I'll likely have to buy a logic board to get one for my Beige as all I ever see are the 66MHz and a few 83MHz but there is near zero supply of the 100MHz.
 
the issue is the only stock G4 Apple ZIF, *was* the 350Mhz and 400Mhz Yikes! ZIF's most/all of which used the earliest Rev 2.6 7400's

if you want anything better then that then your only option was/is 3rd party upgrades, and those have always been sought after, even just finding a Yikes! G4 ZIF was very much a case of biding ones time on eBay, even 10 years ago I remember them being tricky to find, I had to jump through a fair few hoops to get a G4 for my G3 beige even back in 2015

I your best bet these days is to take an existing ZIF and upgrade it yourself or pay someone like @dosdude1 to upgrade it for you, even then when it comes to ZIF's the upgrade path is somewhat limited a 500Mhz G4 is about the end of the world, there has been some exciting work on interposer cards and some 7400 AGP daughter cards have been upgraded with 7447A and 7448 chips, but it remains to be seen how those chips on interposers play with ZIF's there are things to consider like IO voltages, the 60x bus and the such like

even Yikes! G4 ZIF's can be very touchy in G3 beige's both me and @bunnspecial have had quite a lot issues with them in our G3 Beiges, the only G4 ZIF I have that works 100% reliably in my G3 beige is my Sonnet 500Mhz 7410 ZIF

but hopefully in time we will see completely new upgrades designed and made by likes of Colin and other master-tinkers such as himself :)
 
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LightBulbFun said:
the issue is the only stock G4 Apple ZIF, *was* the 350Mhz and 400Mhz Yikes! ZIF's most/all of which used the earliest Rev 2.6 7400's

if you want anything better then that then your only option was/is 3rd party upgrades, and those have always been sought after, even just finding a Yikes! G4 ZIF was very much a case of biding ones time on eBay, even 10 years ago I remember them being tricky to find, I had to jump through a fair few hoops to get a G4 for my G3 beige even back in 2015

I your best bet these days is to take an existing ZIF and upgrade it yourself or pay someone like @dosdude1 to upgrade it for you, even then when it comes to ZIF's the upgrade path is somewhat limited a 500Mhz G4 is about the end of the world, there has been some exciting work on interposer cards and some 7400 AGP daughter cards have been upgraded with 7447A and 7448 chips, but it remains to be seen how those chips on interposers play with ZIF's there are things to consider like IO voltages, the 60x bus and the such like

even Yikes! G4 ZIF's can be very touchy in G3 beige's both me and @bunnspecial have had quite a lot issues with them in our G3 Beiges, the only G4 ZIF I have that works 100% reliably in my G3 beige is my Sonnet 500Mhz 7410 ZIF

but hopefully in time we will see completely new upgrades designed and made by likes of Colin and other master-tinkers such as himself :)
Click to expand...
I've never had an issue with the Yikes ZIF in my Beige, except the first time I installed it, nothing. I had already set the jumpers for 400MHz operation.

I re-installed the G3, and that was working fine, then set the jumpers back for the G4 and reinstalled it. Worked fine ever since.

Flawless operation except at 500MHz on a 83MHz bus, but that really had more to do with the XPC66 being pushed passed it's limits.

I didn't otherwise test 500MHz, but I'd say with proper cooling she may be stable there.

I did find a nice Yikes "local" for cheap, but I'll have to drive up in Cinncy to get it and as much as I'd like to add it to my collection I'm moving this week and don't know if I can find the time. If it's still there on Tuesday next week it would be a steel as they want less for it than the G4 ZIF's sell for.

Not sure if it is the 400MHz or 450MHz.

Be nice to find an upgraded CPU in her, but that's likely too much to ask.

EDIT: Sorry 350MHz or 400MHz, you know the 7400 wasn't rated below 400MHz operation per the users guide.
 
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As @LightBulbFun said I had no end of problems with Yikes! CPUs in beiges. Actually it’s been a few years so my memory may be a bit hazy, and I’m bit eye if I ever spent much time running one in anything other than my AIO.

I had really odd problems, like the computer not POSTing with more than one RAM stick installed(regardless of the size/mix of sticks, and I tried with thing like a factory BTO 3x 128mb out of a beige server). There were other odd things too. @LightBulbFun might remember better-he sometimes knows more about what I have and things I’ve tried than I remember!

I never changed bus speed, especially since I seem to recall @Intell advising not to do that on beiges. I tried various multipliers to run at anything from 233 to whatever a 66mhz bus will let you get that’s close to 400(397? I’m only on one cup of coffee this morning and typing this from my phone…). Stability wasn’t really an issue once booted, though, it was mostly just the getting it to POST.

In any case, I have a 500mhz Sonnet(or 550?) in my AIO now and it has been flawless with any I’ve thrown at it, or rather was before I put it in storage along with most of the rest of my computers.

I seem to recall that Dez found a seller in France who had two Sonnet ZIFs. He bought one and I bought the other. The nice thing about the 7400/7410 Sonnets is that you don’t have to mess with the multipliers on the board. Sonnet baked some magic into the ZIF cards that they just run at their rated speed. I’ve not had that experience with other G4 ZIFs.

Meanwhile, I do have a beige minitower in my office that I’ve always called “the Beast.” Someone gave it to me heavily upgraded, and I’ve only added. It has a 1ghz Sonnet and boots off a 10K SCSI drive. The guy who gave it to me used it as his main computer until 2009 or so. The only major change I’ve made was swapping out his Radeon 7500 for a Radeon 9200, and yes I run it with two displays(one 1920x1080, one 1680x1050).
 
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Believe it or not, I'm trying to look for a G4 ZIF for my Power Mac G3 B&W and not having much luck finding any, until a week ago when a PowerLogix PowerForce G4 ZIF on Yahoo Japan Auctions. Cost a bit, about $195, but those are probably even rarer than the regular G4 Yikes ZIF. Probably the PowerLogix have more overclocking features since it has a dial.

Otherwise, the only accelerators and upgrades are mostly G3 accelerators for the 2nd gen Power Macs, which are relatively cheap to import from Japan due to the weak yen and pricing not being as bad in the US. However , I have not come across many accelerators and ZIF cards that has a G4 sadly.
 
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