I want to upgrade my processor to a dual 1ghz or higher. What is compatible

HI-

Welcome to Discussions!

You can use any Quicksilver processor in the Digital Audio machine as long as you jump +12v to the daughter card lug #4.

No MDD processor is compatible.
If you want higher than dual 1GB from a QS, you will need to go to OWC or Sonnet.

Soldering?
Not necessarily.
It is an easy mod.
http://homepage.mac.com/josephk/G4_mod.html

In the link japamac posted, scroll down to the heading, "12 Volt Power Connector for 4th Mount Point". If you click on any of the small pictures, they will be shown much larger. This picture shows how the author used a nut and short bolt to fix a "loop" or "spade" connector on a wire to supply the required 12 Volts to the fourth lug on these faster processors. No soldering needed, and can be undone in a jiffy.

There is one more issue you may face if your old processor has the cooling fan powered off two pins on the processor module. The new processor will not have those pins, and you will need a 12 Volt fan adaptor (also off a Hard Drive power connector, or even the same power connector) to run the cooling fan.

Some of these adapters have Red, Black, and Yellow wires (instead of the expected Red and Black only). The yellow wire is an RPM output from the fan, and can be safely ignored.

Thank you Grant, for crossing the T's and dotting the i's! 🙂
Definitely need to know information!

japamac-

Thanks for your kind words.

I only know something about these issues because they tripped me up pretty badly. It certainly is not intuitive that the design went from "so much 12 V power we can run the cooling fan off the processor module" to "so little 12 V power we need a new huge contact to supply tons more 12 V power to the processor".

The other thing I learned \[school of hard knocks]: DO NOT run these newer processors without the heat sink in place!! They WILL self-destruct from heat!!

Hi-

*Don't buy that one!*
That is a MDD processor, and won't work.
You are looking for This One.

Hello All,

My experience has been that although the dual 800MHz and 1GHz processors work in the Digital Audio, the DA does not recognise the L3 cache of the dual processors. It does recognise the L3 cache of the 933MHz CPU.

Jon

Hi Jon-

That brings up another interesting issue. Some versions of the processors you mentioned do not have the chips on board for the L3 cache. There is an 800 MHz with no cache chips.

There is also one ebay seller who advertises 933 processors, but you soon discover these are cacheless 733 processors that have been overclocked.