Working on a supercharged G4. Looking forward to any advice!

- A quiet 120x120x38mm fan (Where can I find a good and cheap one???)

Check out Vantec Stealth. I used some of their fans when uprating the cooling in a highly upgraded Beige G3 and didn't want to add to the already loud concert the Beige produced (think "WW2 bombers flying through my office!"). They were only a little more coin than the cheap fans that come in bulk, yet have full airflow and rotation markings on the case and came with a proper Molex splitter/adaptor so I had no wire splicing/soldering. Made a much neater job.

alfonsojon wrote:

... I'm currently on a quest of sorts to supercharge my G4... trying to get the best hardware possible...

Upgrade Wishlist:

- SATA II PCI-X card, must be bootable and 3Gbps! (~$25 - $?? on eBay)

- SATA II 500 GB HDD @ 7200 RPM (already have one!)

I think the fastest read/write hard drive performance you can get would be a hardware striped RAID-0 card, like the ACARD AEC-6880M, although it is a slower ATA-133 interface, a hardware RAID can match or better the performance of a single drive SATA in a G4, I have used both in my MDD. I am not sure if there is a comparable hardware RAID SATA PCI card that would be compatible with the G4, does anyone know of one?

I am pretty sure that if you had a hardware SATA raid with SSD's you might actually go back in time, kind of like putting instant coffee in the microwave.

Here's another suggestion, after you finish swapping out parts in your machine, you might consider adding some fresh thermal paste to the CPU spots at the heatsink contact point. I noticed that after I had replaced my PSU and added some hard drives that I was overheating under CPU load fairly quickly, when watching a YouTube video for example. The CPU would rise quickly and the fans would kick in, but apparently too late and I would either get the "you must restart your computer" screen or it would just lock up. I think when you open and close the machine several times, and move it around, you may lose some of the thermal contact between the CPU and heatsink. Anyway, after doing some work in the machine, and thinking this might be what is going on, I added some fresh thermal paste to the CPU at the heatsink contact points and screwed in the heatsink nice and tight, and now the temperatures remain within normal range. I can even disable the CPU Nap feature and after several minutes of heavy load the max temp is around 60 deg C. Before it would climb to 69+ and lock up requiring a forced shut down. It had been quite a long time since I had put thermal paste in there, so maybe it was due, but I think the actions of opening it up and working on things may have caused some settling in the heatsink contacts so the heat was not dissipating effectively. Just something to consider if you notice temperature issues after you have been working inside the machine. Good luck!

Great advice as usual Glen! 🙂

I was getting hard freezes on a MDD G4 that I bought on eBay a few years back. I was going to replace the logic board, but got no further with taking the system apart than removing the heatsinks. The thermal paste looked like the floor of death valley, cracked, flaky, dry. Easy fix.

I have a SSD connected to a Sonnet Tempo SATA card in my MDD. It feels pretty fast but I've never done benchmarked it. I did compare a 300gb ATA drive with a 1.5tb SATA drive on my SATA card. The 1.5tb SATA drive was about twice as fast as the ATA drive. I'll benchmark the SSD as soon as I can and get back to you.

I think the G4 MDD has PCI slots, so while the PCI-X cards should be backwards compatible, the longer card will spill over the slot but it will still work, they will be limited to the slower PCI bandwidth in your machine. I get about 100MB/sec peak read/write speeds with SATA-I on the 2-port Tempo SATA PCI card from Sonnet (same as SeriTek 1S2), and I wonder if SATA-II could even get much faster through the PCI slot.

FYI - here are some benchmarks in an older model G4 Sawtooth:

http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Hard_Drive_Benchmarks.html

sadly, the author has not been active in the Discussions for quite a while.

I didn’t have much time last night but I tested a 300gb Seagate on the G4s ata133 interface and a 120gb Crucial SSD on a Sonnet Tempo SATA card using Xbench

The 300gb drive

uncached write - 58.56 MB/sec

uncached read – 56.71 MB/sec

120gb SSD

uncached write – 103.12 MB/sec

uncached read – 77.14 MB/sec

I am honestly not that familiar with all the different revisions of PCI over the years, but I thought the PCI-X designation was introduced in the second round of G5 models, and may look similar but it operates on a faster bus speed. The G4 MDD has 64-bit PCI slots, which are twice as long as the older 32-bit PCI slots.

It may be worth scouring http://barefeats.com, there seems to be some posts that have cards that cover G4 & G5, so maybe PCI-X will be OK?

http://barefeats.com/hard49.html