The World's FASTEST Power Mac Quicksilver?
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
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Today, we're installing a CUSTOM dual 2GHz G4 processor card into a Power Mac Quicksilver. Then, we'll take a look at the new version of Sorbet Leopard, and see just what kind of crazy performance increase we'll see.
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#Apple #Macintosh #G4
And you applied that thermal compound JUST RIGHT! :)
you must be nobody ;)
We require a backup of that drive. For research purposes of course.
Lol
I have never seen a more perfect application of thermal paste in my life. Spot on. 👏
I'm sure TronicsFix would say it was almost the perfect amount of thermal paste.
From my point of view: As long as the CPU doesn't get too hot and you didn't use a trowel, it'll be an okay amount of thermal paste.
Love it! It's cool to see new life breathed into old machines, which really, I think is the essence of what we're all trying to do in the retro tech community. And when that 7800GS left the factory, I doubt it could ever imagine what its fate would be 15 years later.
Do I personify inanimate objects? Why yes, sometimes! Doesn't everybody?
It's just like my Quicksilver:
Dual 1.8ghz (GigaDesigns)
1.5GB RAM
ATi 9800Pro
SeriTeK SATA card with SSD
Pioneer DVD burner (SuperDrive compatible)
Replaced every fan with Noctua units
I treat performance per watt like a golf score around here! That is the funniest thing i've heard when describing the PowerMacs :)
You have no idea how much I needed this today.
That's a pretty impressive gain in performance! It's kind-of shocking to think how much further they could've taken these machines if they were less about trying to make people buy whole new machines, and actually offered upgrades for previous generations.
Like, not everyone's going to spend $3-6k every 2 years for a whole new high-end machine, but they might be willing to pay $1k for a processor upgrade.
Awesome! The Quicksilver has always been my favorite. Mine is running a custom dual 1.4ghz upgrade and a 9600 (i think) from a G5.
So did you take your custom dual 1.4ghz from a mirror door G4?
@@danielrhodes7594 no, it is a modified 800mhz dp card, I purchased it that way from eBay. The MDD cards won’t physically fit in quicksilver.
@@ericbauer4559 Oh, ok. I had watched a video where a MDD dual 1.4Ghz was put in a G4 cube with modifications, so I thought the same could have been done in a quicksilver.
@@danielrhodes7594 It could probably work electrically, but with the orientation of the card, it would hang over the ram slots.
it's not the amount that matters, that it's full coverage on a bare die does. Make sure it actually contacts the whole shiny bit there and that's good enough. The pea sized thing is for CPUs with heatspreaders built onto them.
It is also largely a myth. Unless the paste is conducive, and 99% of non-liquid metal ones aren't, you can't put TOO MUCH, as it won't harm anything. You can, however, put too little.
@@acumenium8157yeah, but if you put "too much" and it squeezes out such that it doesn't give full coverage of a bare die, as just sticking a pea-sized blob on it might do, then it's not enough. Those tubes come with spludgers so you can spread it out and prevent that.
Looking at apple now you wouldn't think that they'd have ANY sort of history of any of their hardware being easy to work on.
Looking at apple o fthe past you would think they'd activly advertise how easy it is for users to open the thing up. no mysteries, no scary bits. Meet your computer. It wants you to look inside.
This build is genuinely astounding and scratches an itch I have but am too broke to indulge in. This, the mystic, and GS builds have been jawdropping.
I think they got locked into a bit of a vicious cycle and culture war problem. When Apple focused on making their systems expandable and user servicable, it was pretty thankless. the tech crowd hated them on principle (after all, artists and other non-techs liked them), and they were not going to ever be able to compete with the flexibility of the IBM clones nor did they have the hard core market of amiga, so eventually they just gave up.
The easy to work on mantra of the past was one of many that died with Steve Jobs. It was one of the many policies Steve had to fight for as it was very costly to Apple’s bottom line. They know they can make much more if users are forced to buy a new product.
The original owner of this Mac must have had a pretty good taste in computers for someone who put adult entertainment on the desktop😅
made me giggle, love this channel man!
They organized it meticulously, though. Sounds like good taste indeed.
Cursed Action Retro: "whoa, get a load of this stuff. We got some legit out of print goodies in here!"
As a self-proclaimed computer repair expert, I have to say that was the exact perfect amount of thermal paste.
Favorite case design, ever. For both Macs and PCs. It was just glorious. No sharp metal edges, took 1 second to open and access, such an amazing aesthetic. They've lost their way!!
I installed a 1GHZ processor upgrade card on my old G4. Surprisingly it worked easily and right away lol. I dont think it was hand built though!
I've just recently acquired a Quicksilver myself. 933 MHz PPC G4, 1 GB memory, 75 GB hard disk. Managed to put 10.5.8 on it, and a bunch of apps.
Thermal paste application was unbelievable. For the first time in history it was the exact right amount. Amazing!
I used to own one of these and still thinks it looks better than the Mac Studio that is sitting on my desk right now. Not only does it look better but being able to upgrade the internals was great!
herd is the man. i've purchased some of his custom 7448 cards for my various old PPC macs :D
I recently discovered your channel and I wanted to thank you for inspiring me to give some attention to my Power Mac G5 Quad. I'm in the process of converting it to air cooling.
Action Retro: Come for the Retro Macs, Stay for the X-Files T-Shirts.™
I was expecting some censored pixilation on the thermal compound there. Always loved the look of these machines.
I had a 1.25ghz MDD G4, I sold it about 10 years ago. I regret doing that so much, I'd love to still have it in my collection.
Love the design of this Mac. Easy to open and acces to everything. We had these on our design school and these G4 Macs were absolute beasts at everything we threw at it.
Honestly, my love for this machine is second only to my G5 Quad. This machine is just so charming.
Those quad G5s are getting rare to find in working condition. I mean G5s in general are hard to find working but I am seriously jealous wish I still had mine
That application was graceful and perfect
You know you watched some of the hard drive contents 😂
The end of the video is just full *THONKS*
As you actually applied thermal paste and not left is bare, you did it right!
I love the stuff you do with these macs. It makes me feel like playing with my old (non-mac) hardware again. Maybe try to run Minecraft on a P3 or P4.
Great video, sir. I have a dual 1 GHz Quicksilver I still use for Office tasks
I love the QuickSilver I still have mine, with the original monitor, keyboard, and mouse all packed away I their original boxes. 😊 This computer was such a great user experience I’ve held on to it for all these years.
That amount of thermal compound, is so good, it looks like Goldilocks applied it. After she broke into your house, ate your food, sat in your chairs, slept in your beds, and played your favorite medium difficulty games after deleting the saves.
I passed up buying one of those cheap years ago from my university's surplus yard. I really wanted it, but I had no idea where to put it! Sadness. How neat that you can upgrade the processor so far with a modern card!
Perfect amount of thermal paste.
The PowerMacs are the nicest looking rigs anywhere. Be fun to see Yellow Dog Linux running on it.
I used 4 of those dual drive G4 drive caddies in my 1939 Philco radio cabinet PC case, so I can mount up to 8 internal hard drives into it. I made a custom PC case from a 1939 Philco radio. The wood cabinet is very spacious, and I draw air in through 8 intake fans.
I think about the two quicksilvers I threw out about 4 years ago...before I collected retro tech, kills me to think about all the things I sent to the scrapper...... **Sad mac noises**
I threw out a Powerbook G3 about 8 years ago because the LCD panel was busted. I sure wish I'd known that's probably one of the easier parts to source!
@@MrDeelightful but like I said to Action Retro, more of the older stuff that gets thrown out the more valuable the stuff that is still left around.... I mean I just bought an Osbourne and a Hyperion for more then I paid for my last 2 project cars.....
It's better to have too much thermal paste than not enough, especially for bare die chips. You don't want leave any part of the die dry. The excess will get squeezed out by the heatsink. As long as the thermal paste is not electrically conductive, it'll be fine no matter now much you put in.
Got a dead quicksilver so very interested to see the power supply mod 👍
I have subscribed purely to make you happy and so I can see more epic retro content.
Keep up the splended work, Sean :D
I have a Quicksilver in my cellar. My main memory of it is that it has very loud fans.
Not as loud as the MDD, but loud. I have an 800-DP. I too would like to find one of these dual 2 Ghz cards.
Man! just went down a crazy "action retro" rabbit whole and loving it. Keep 'em coming!
You did just right on the thermal compound.
I usually recommend switching the airflow direction of the CPU fan on the back, because normally it blows inward. Since the CPU fan is pulling air from the back of the computer there's a good chance it's taking hot air from the PS and just cycling it back into the case, especially if the tower is in a small enclosure or smushed against a wall. Also the CPU fan in stock orientation blows into the back of the optical drive which often has its own exhaust fan which would be trying to blow out. Kind of makes for bad airflow.
These machines are known for PS faults and unfortunately, because of ADC and its unique 24V line, there are no drop-in replacements available; you either have to mod an ATX one and lose ADC in the process (not a big deal typically) or try to source/repair an original PS.
I have a suggestion for a video, I'd love for you to try out the apple emac, I don't see a lot of videos about it and you're the perfect Mac guy to do it
It was one of the most beautiful cases of all time. I still have one, albeit empty!
Man I had a cube I upgraded with a G4 dual 500mhz card and a flashed PC GeForce MX4. I loved that thing.. I still kick myself for getting rid of it. I also had a blue G4 upgraded to a 1.4ghz G4 card I got on ebay. Researching that card it seems it was some high temp G4 that was overclocked from 1.0 to 1.4.. or maybe it was 1.2.. I forget. Wish I had that too. The speed between the dual 500 and the single 1.2 was interesting. You could feel the dual 500 was "smoother" in the GUI and some apps, but the 1.2 over powered it in some apps.
cool, but since you installed that 7800 would have been nice to see some more games tho, maybe Halo, UT2004, AoE etc.
also a compare vs a Dual G5 1.8 or 2.0 would also have been very interesting
anyways that Quicksilver PM looks awesome, can't wait to find one for my collection too
I know that a 2.1 single core imac g5 gets around 1250 in geekbench 2 if that helps you
That seems to be performing similarly to my mobile workstation laptop from 2008. Definitely impressive.
Very nice! Close but still you need more practise. Dual MaxPower 1.8ghz G4 7448b's running at 2.251ghz and stable for north of 6 years. SATA PCI, GF7950 512mb flashed to nv7800 with clocks running at 7950 speeds. 1.5ghz ram. Stable for 8+ years.
You have really built your “brand”. Your distinctive gestures, voice, and very interesting upgrades make for great learning oops.
I was lucky enough to get two dual cpu cards from herd - one with a pair of 7457's, one with a pair of 7455's - only 1.2GHz, but may still have some more MHz inside them if i push them. The reason for sticking with the 7457's and 7455's is the L2 cache size and L3 cache support. I have a Digital Audio 733 that i plan on modding with a QS2002 board & PSU.
You should be able to get 1.5 GHz or so out of a 7457 no problem. The issue is the L3 cache is limited in how fast it can run (and it is based on a ratio set in the card's SPD EEPROM of the CPU clock speed). I was able to locate some 333 MHz rated 1MB L3 cache chips, and installing those along with flashing the SPD EEPROM with a dump from a 1.42 GHz MDD CPU card (which has 2x1MB L3 cache chips per CPU, along with the highest ratio) should allow for even faster overclocks, with the added benefit of having 2MB of L3 cache per CPU.
The Quicksilver is, without a doubt, my favorite PowerMac desktop. But my heart truly belongs to the gooseneck iMac G4. In my opinion, it's the most beautiful computer ever made.
Fantastic upgrade Sean And Herd Is Awesome with his magic Upgrade nowhow
I will take that original hard drive off your hands. For science.
FYI: a HighPoint RocketRaid 1740 maxes out the PCI 32 bit/66hz bus and provides a bootable (if I remember from the olden days) SATA II connection if you want the SSD to really scoot.
Awesome video! Until now, I had no idea that Apple once made Macs that you could work on without exotic tools like pentalobe screwdrivers and heat guns, acrobatics to avoid damaging ribbon cables and connectors, unique disassembly guides and custom adhesives for reassembling. I guess it still took some hardware hacking to make off-the-shelf parts work with them, but apart from that, those old PowerMac G3s and G4s look fun to work on.
I totally did the screwdriver, pentalobe and tri-lobe dance today replacing an iPhone battery. Apple has been hit and miss with this type of user customization design.
I remember often on G4’s and G5’s stuff even though it seems easy to ‘upgrade’ or replace, there’s always getting the hardware to jive with everything else. Or the drivers/firmware not existing or being incompatible under the operating system or software.
It’s a trip seeing this upload.
You really need to make a backup of the exclusive adult content!
Minecraft on this runs pretty much the way it did on the first PC i played it on. Granted, that was a much, much older version, so i bet this G4 is actually faster than the Pentium 4 machine i had.
I have a Quicksilver G4 867 like that, pretty much like new. I´d love that upgrade for my puppy. :D
Mine is the QS2002 2x1Ghz which I upgraded to 2x1.8Ghz 1.5GB RAM, and added a SATA card to run the boot SSD and HDD with the Documents folder symlinked from the SSD.
All the people that complain about thermal paste have little experience. They built that one computer that one time and now have become an expert.
I was able to get with herd. Its going to take a little while to make the modification. of the IDE port on the main board. Since I have a second mainboard I have a plan.
I had to return the MDD G4 towers I had back their original owner... I wasn't really motivated to work on them since I wasn't able to buy them from him. Even though they don't work now they're his link to his glory days. I did manage to go through a bag of hard drives from the era and found some old recordings from 20 years ago. Not the recordings I was hoping to find though unfortunately.
would be nice if apple offered this case again for their new hardware
Buddy of mine snagged one of these from near a dumpster by him and gave it to me. Can’t remember the specs off hand but at some point it would be cool to upgrade it. Also nice to see someone give the Quicksilver some love, as I tend to see more MDD G4’s get modded. It’s justified as it’s a beautiful machine, but the Quicksilver is pretty slick too imo.
Be aware twenty year old machines may have been worked to desth, they can be fragile.
Don't be too tempted to spend too much on specialized upgrades if the machine is going to be short lived or barely used.
@@joefish6091 Computer speed increased a lot faster in those days - the difference between a 2000 and a 2010 machine is enormous. So it may have had a shorter working life than many machines would these days.
CPU upgrades are pretty rare and expensive these days. I wouldn't spend a lot of money on one either, as even upgraded, it would likely still be outgunned by a Raspberry Pi. You're better off just buying one that had high-end specs from the factory, as they're not much more expensive than the lesser models. And at the end of the day, once the nostalgia hit has passed, it's unlikely to be used much anyway.
you are applying the thermal compound with your wrong hand!!! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Do you have any plans to make a video of upgrading the video card on the Power Mac G5 quad
Hey, if you want a free speedup for your G4 monster, do try to install the Sonnet G4 open firmware patch for their upgrades. It also works on any other upgrades (dunno if 7448/e600 based ones, but it's worth a shot!) and it gave me a MASSIVE boost on anything that was limited by the FSB speed. I dunno what black bus protocol or FSB overclocking magic Sonnet worked into their patch, but it surely does work really well!
Hi! Such scores are not unheard of on Quicksilver because there have been dual-processor accelerator cards based on 7447 and 7448 running at a frequency of 2Ghz (Newertech, Gigadesigns etc...). On the other hand, what is exclusive is the custom of an original Quiscksilver Dual CPU Board. Just for the performance we must salute the initiative which is not within everyone's reach...far from it. I would like to know the cost of such a modification all the same (purchase of the 2 CPUs, CPU Board, labor etc...)! Gongratulations
Was there ever a (commercially available) 7448 based Mac-upgrade? I don't think so, the MPC7448 was actually just a different name for the e600 generation and would have had 1MB L2, which would have been a massive boon for the notoriously FSB-throttled G4s!....
About the geforce 7800 it might just take too much current from the agp slot of the g4 taking it out of spec, remember that those high end agp 8x cards have higher specs for the power consumption, so this card might end up frying your g4's psu, so instead just take a universal agp card because will not run the agp slot out of spec on those machines.
I may be probably wrong, but if the graphics card fits in the slot and doesn’t requires external power it should be good. The agp slot actually changes in order to not damage I think older agp spec cards with the different voltages.
As usual, Great Video. Wish I could find this type of upgrade for MDD.
Watching your videos finally motivated me to complete the restoration of my dual 1.8GHz G5. It's been a lot of fun just playing around in old OS X, seeing what actually is still possible and what isn't. Really wishing I'd bought a Mac-edition 6800 Ultra when they were still cheap on eBay, the FX5200 has been my main limiting factor I think. WELL SHIT! I HAVE THAT 7800GS! I didn't know I could make it work on a Mac! Looks like I got more work to do! 😁
The system bus speed of 133mhz is what really cripples this system, even with a CPU upgrade. That along with the AGP graphics card. It works better with a CPU upgrade but still that bus speed :/ I had one running Debian for a long time. Too bad all these tech companies are making machines that are all soldered down and have no upgrades. I think you might want to try MorphOS or AROS ha.
That was the perfect amount of thermal paste! Just right!
Regarding thermal compound: you did it just right! 😉
I'm really amazed by herd's upgrase huge increase of performance !
Do you know how much does this daughter board cost? Just curious to know if i Can revive my powermac 😮
I wish it was this easy to adapt newer x86 cpus to older sockets. Imagine being able to slot a core 2 quad in a 486 board.
Big difference here, though. A G4 was basically a G3 with AltiVec, and a G3 was just a 603ev with better cache management and a beefed-up FPU. All of them would run on the same sockets and core logic, because they were just improved versions of the original.
Cyrix actually did do something like this with their 5x86 CPU. They took the 6x86/MII design and removed all of the features that weren't compatible with the 486 bus and core logic, and made it fit in a 486 socket. It was the fastest thing you could run on a 486 socket, in fact, beating AMD's fast 486es and Intel's PODP. If they had kept the design on the 486 socket and crammed MMX on there, made it address memory at 64-bits internally, and added a huge on-die L2 cache...well... But they didn't do that because there wasn't demand for it (they did develop the 5x86 into the MediaGX SOC, but that's a different story). There was demand for making better and better 603 processors, aka the G3 and G4.
DX4-120 DX5-133 all on the 33 MHz 486 bus.
The speed of 486 machines is best illustrated by the fact that it took five minutes to make a three minute MP3.
The 300 MHz PCs could do it faster than the song length.
An emulated 14MHz Amiga A1200 decompresses a 100K lha file in two seconds, my dual E5-2690 32 cores 4GHz PC does 1GB in 10 seconds.
Need to reflow or replace my dual cpu 800mhz Quiksilver. The l3 cache as some problem. Always on power up need to reset the Mac to ignore l3 cache.
my quicksilver died on me a few years ago, i’m not 100% sure what happened but i feel like i have an idea. it didn’t occur to me to replace the motherboard at any stage so i just dismantled it and recycled the parts and gave the boards to my oldest boy to use in one of his projects.
the case is gone so it’s too late to do anything now. i had some cooling issues with it and tried a few things to make that better. i feel like perhaps when it was taken into the repair shop that they didn’t reapply any thermal paste, not sure though. i managed a few decent upgrades such as the Ati Raedeon 9000 and Giga Designs dual processor upgrade, up from the original 933Mhz.
Hey Action Retro! I just wanna know what adapter do you use for your Apple Studio Display to connect it to your PC video card. Thanks!
There is literally no such thing as too much thermal compound. Not enough, and you don't get good coverage on the heat spreader, compromising your interface to the heat sink. "Too much" and you're just smooshing some out the sides where it'll do no good, but it's not like wasting a few grams of silicon grease will appreciably reduce your cooling performance. Not on any scale that matters to a CPU, anyway. Personally I like to spread the paste, myself, so I can see and know I've got good coverage, and my rule is "spread it like Vegemite, not like Nutella", but as long as you get coverage, you're fine.
Caveat: using too much _silver_ thermal paste is a bad thing, because that stuff's electrically conductive, and if you smoosh that out into the wrong place, you could short something.
That Vegemite line is gold lmao
@@MrDeelightful Something possibly only Australians will get. Not even the British with their Marmite will quite get the idea, because you can spread Marmite quite thick and still enjoy it.
Where do regular people buy those upgrades...?
I'd like to see you load modern Linux on that machine just to see what it could handle. The cool thing for me is seeing older hardware get a few upgrades and then hold its own with much newer stuff.
have you ever overclocked the front side bus? or thought of doing a period correct OC?
In my 3 decade experience with building and repairing computers, ANY amount of thermal paste is better than none. So dont let people start no jive talk out of the amount of Thermal Paste you use. ;-)
My fav powermac for looks is the blue G3
I have the box for this and the in store demo cd to the demo is weird it runs under 9.2 but it came out in 2003. I also have the imac g4 instore demo cd to.
I also have a rare g4 server thats in a consumer case and its not the xserve.
I've got a QS for this same end goal, though my specs will be somewhat different by the end if I get around to it -- dual 1.67GHz 7457s, a 7800 GS, a SeriTek 2SE4, and I'd love to find a way to get 1GB PC133 sticks made for keyboards working in the QS. Maybe a Radeon HD 3850 for Linux.
i *love* meticulous organization! :D
Dumb question: does the dual 2.0 setup allow this Mac to run OS 9? Part of the draw of the powermac G4 line for me is that they are the fastest classic mac os-compatible machines, not sure if this modification ruins that utility.
You gotta make a custom dual 2GHz original PowerMac G4.
Let's get a 20" iMac G4 mod!
Love those modded CPU's, not like i have one because I cant afford it XD But the work that dude is doing is awesome with the custom designed interposter etc.
But may I ask do you know why he opted to not install the 1-2MB of L3 cache?
Im pretty sure these 2Ghz G4's has the 512K L2 cache but even on my inferior Sawtooth I saw a FPS gain of 48% in Quake 3 going from a G4 800Mhz with no L3 cache to a 800Mhz with 2MB L3 cache. Also the OS X experience went from meh to awesome.
Is L3 not supported with those processors because and if it is it seems like 2MB of L3 per CPU would offer WAY more performance considering the memory bandwidth dont change with the CPU speed and two processors sharing it should make that problem even bigger.
Would love to see dual 2Ghz with Dual 2MB of L3 if possible! Think that would kick ass on a howl new level.
EDIT: i realized that the answer to my own question might be there are no L3 cache chips capable of running at the speed required with that core clock (2Ghz) even with the lowest L3 cache divider.
Still begs the question, what is faster, L3 cache plus as high as you can go on the G4 or no L3 and even higher core clock.
I think these ones have fast L2 cache and no L3 cache.
@@axi0matic Im pretty sure it has the bigger 512K L2 cache but I recall seeing lower clocked versions of that with 1MB L3 cache also installed.
@ isn’t that the 7455?
@@axi0matic From what I can find the 7447 and 7457 has the 512K L2 cache and supports 4MB L3 cache apparently.
Idk what chip is used here but the 7455 seems to be the option if you want 2Ghz so L3 should be supported.
Also there is the 7448 with 1Mb of l2 cache, but again idk whats used on this card, maybe thats whats being used?
There is no mentioning of L3 cache support on the 7448 so could explain why it was not used.
1Mb of l2 full speed cache is pretty dam cool to say the least!
No expert on the subject, could never afford an upgrade like this anyways XD
@ The 7455's were the ones used in the later G4 towers. They had 2MB of L3 but max out at about 1.5GHz. The '57 seems to be the one you're thinking of (the '47 is the version without L3). The 47 was used in later G4 laptops; the towers had moved on to the G5.
The '48 is the ultimate, and is probably what is being used here. G4's used smaller process nodes as they went on, so the final versions were both the fastest and most power efficient.
I still have my 2002 Mirror Drive, no scratches, so beautiful and sexy
And where can we get that terrific dual G4 processor card? herd unfortunately doesn‘t ship to Europe… 😖
The problems is, there is no more dual CPU G4 upgrade anywhere in the market which I can upgrade my old MDD Mac. Sad.........................
Oh and I still have my fully refurbed Graphite G4.
Why would they choose the version of OSX that doesn't have compatibility mode as the version to continue updating?