Experiences with CPU accelerators

I have had three good experiences with PowerLogix CPU upgrades: first on a Beige G3/366 -> PL G3/400, then a B&W G3/350 -> PL G4/550, and finally, the same B&W -> PL G3/1100. All were simple to install, all have functioned perfectly, all were purchased from OWC.

I have one more to go - at some point when not so busy, I'm going to replace the Beige G3's PL G3/400 with my PL G4/550 and use the machine for a low load server and gateway.

Speaking of CPU upgrades, I have an aging Cube 450 that I'm trying to
decide between upgrading and replacing. Do any of you out there have
direct experience with upgrades for the Cube ? Unfortunately for me
it's more than the processor (even though showing its age I'm not
completely displeased with its speed, but I need a new DVD drive and
my video card is drawing random transparent lines on the left side of
the screen, so upgrading it means replacing these three bits). I'm
quite happy with the machine in general, love the silence and the
saved space so I'm quite torn. Any cube upgrade experiences out there
?

Thanks,

Christopher Appell
Paris, France

The best resource I've seen for information on CPU upgrades is
<http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/cpureview.lasso>, a database with thousands of user reports
on various upgrades, as well as reviews, and information on other upgrades.

Harro de Jong

On Nov 10, 2004, at 12:35 PM, Christophe Appell wrote:

> Speaking of CPU upgrades, I have an aging Cube 450 that I'm trying to
> decide between upgrading and replacing. Do any of you out there have
> direct experience with upgrades for the Cube ? Unfortunately for me
> it's more than the processor (even though showing its age I'm not
> completely displeased with its speed, but I need a new DVD drive and
> my video card is drawing random transparent lines on the left side of
> the screen, so upgrading it means replacing these three bits). I'm
> quite happy with the machine in general, love the silence and the
> saved space so I'm quite torn. Any cube upgrade experiences out there
> ?

Well, that's a hard one. Problem is that most video cards and CPU
upgrades available for the Cube require fans, and destroy all that
lovely silence. You CAN fit any Apple Radeon into the Cube. Some have
fans, some don't. Those that don't will quite likely overheat and burn
out when put into a Cube, but I managed to get nearly two years of life
out of one such Radeon before it gave up the ghost. Not too bad for a
$60 investment.

CPU-wise, your best bet is to get the CPU out of another Cube that's
gone defunct. Failing that, there's a handful of upgrades for it, some
of which can be found on clearance at places like OWC now and again.
eBay's another good place to look. There's one or two fanless upgrades
(specific names are not coming to mind) and plenty of upgrades will
work that include fans.

DVD, comparatively, is easy. You need a slimline DVD drive of the
appropriate size. Usually pretty easy to track down on eBay.

[Sorry about the empty reply irectly yo you... ooops]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 11:35:59 -0800, Christophe Appell
<butchfaggmail.com> wrote:
> the screen, so upgrading it means replacing these three bits). I'm
> quite happy with the machine in general, love the silence and the
> saved space so I'm quite torn. Any cube upgrade experiences out there

By the time you look at a new DVD, a decent vid card, and a processor
upgrade, you are a very significant way toward a 17" iMac. whiel not
as small, it is silent and has a gorgeous 17" LCD thrown in, so to
speak :)

--
 ::::::=== <http://2blog.kreme.com> ===::::::

--On Wednesday, November 10, 2004 11:35:59 AM CST -0800 Christophe Appell
<butchfaggmail.com> wrote:

> Speaking of CPU upgrades, I have an aging Cube 450 that I'm trying to
> decide between upgrading and replacing. Do any of you out there have
> direct experience with upgrades for the Cube ? Unfortunately for me
> it's more than the processor (even though showing its age I'm not
> completely displeased with its speed, but I need a new DVD drive and
> my video card is drawing random transparent lines on the left side of
> the screen, so upgrading it means replacing these three bits). I'm
> quite happy with the machine in general, love the silence and the
> saved space so I'm quite torn. Any cube upgrade experiences out there
> ?

The only thing I've done on a cube is replace the ethernet board after a
lightning strike. I think all the components (except maybe the processor)
you're looking at are supposed to be user replaceable, but the ethernet
board is definitely not. The cube is a masterful design that nearly
impossible to get apart and back together correctly (highly recommended
that you take digital pictures as you go along.)

I do remember getting the video card out was pretty tricky. I think
CubeOwner probably has some useful info.

<http://cubeowner.com/>

I posted the pictures I saved from my procedure to my .Mac page.
<http://homepage.mac.com/kvanhaaren/PhotoAlbum2.html>

Kevin

Like several others are reporting, I have had good experiences with five different CPU upgrades -- most of them purchased from Other World Computing.

Our latest upgrade was a B&W G3 -- originally 400MHz now with a 1 GHz G3. What's interesting here is that with the G3 chip you retain the original bus speed. Least you think that a G4 chip should actually give you a better overall performance in this system, then you have to weigh up the disadvantage of reducing bus speed in order to make the G4 chip behave.

In my book CPU upgrades certainly add useful life to an aging box.

Cheers,

John Wolff Hamilton, NZ

On Nov 11, 2004, at 1:10 PM, dtopcomp wrote:

> Like several others are reporting, I have had good experiences with
> five different CPU upgrades -- most of them purchased from Other World
> Computing.

I've also had a good experience with their upgrades.

I'm using an OWC Mercury Extreme 1 GHz G4 upgrade in my formerly 500
MHz G4 AGP minitower. At the same time I also replaced the DVD-RAM
drive with a SuperDrive. I had previously replaced the stock video card
with a Radeon 9000 Mac Edition. It now has 120G + 80G internal drives.
With those upgrades and 768M of RAM, the G4 performs excellently.

At 11:13 AM -0800 11/17/04, Adrian Smith wrote:
>I was heartened to read Geoff's article when it originally appeared
>because I had ordered a Sonnet Duet upgrade for an G4/733 (Digital
>Audio) only a few days before.

I'm glad you enjoyed the article!

>However the machine wouldn't startup - the power light came on but
>nothing else. I restarted it multiple times and managed to get it up
>without any video signal a couple of times but not reliably.

The only similar incident I've heard of is third-hand, from folks
installing Sonnet upgrades in older Blue-and-White G3s acting as
servers. In one case they didn't get the ZIF socket seated correctly,
and the machine exhibited the power-but-no-startup behavior you saw.
Reseating the upgrade did the trick.

Something similar may have happened with yours - it may not have been
fully seated. Although the connector for the Duet upgrade is not a
ZIF socket, it can still be tricky to seat. I installed mine three
times, and one time it didn't give me that satisfying "click" of a
clean installation (though it ran fine).

>* Noise levels... This machine has always been quite noisy as it had
>a dedicated processor fan unlike most machines of its vintage. The
>upgrade also has a processor fan which I think is slightly noisier
>than one it replaced.

I also noticed a substantial increase in noise levels when I
installed the Sonnet Duet upgrade. Shortly after installation I
removed, cleaned, and re-lubricated the fan behind the processor heat
sink, then re-installed it. That seemed to take care of the
worst-case noises.

However, some correspondence I received after publishing the Sonnet
Duet review took issue with my description of that fan: I noted it
was pushing air out the back of my computer, but one reader said,
"Um, no, it should be pulling air in!" and sent excerpts of the Apple
service docs to back up his claim. Who am I to argue? I called a
local lab manager who has four G4/800s of essentially identical
vintage to mine (all of which I cycled through in my efforts to find
a Mac OS X-friendly unit) and asked him to check the back fans: three
pulled air in, one pushed air out. So I'm guessing Apple had some
mis-wired fans!

Fortunately, reversing the airflow on this fan was merely a matter of
reversing it in the sleeve/bracket which holds it to the back of the
QuickSilver. No solder, just two screws and a turn of the wrist. Of
course, once I did that, the machine started making horrible
vibrating noises! I opened it back up and determined the sound was
from the plastic sleeve vibrating against the back of the computer:
ironically, slightly *loosening* the screws holding it in place
dampened the vibration enough to eliminate the sound.

So: the computer isn't the quietest in the world after the upgrade -
if I hold a SPL meter about a foot away at a 45 degree angle to its
front and side, it registers a pretty substantial 57 db. (Above the
level of my desk, I'm at about 41 db.) So I'm not going to be
recording voice artists with it nearby.

>* Current Problems... Like Geoff I've run into a couple of problems
>and in fact they seem quite similar to his (quoted above), ie
>sometimes restarts/shutdowns will fail in much the same way as Geoff
>described.

You're only Duet user besides me who I've heard of with this problem!
I'd recommend checking a) if your firmware is up to date, and b)
contacting Sonnet. Our G4s are sufficiently different that I don't
know that there would be any commonality, but I'm sure they'd
appreciate the data, at least.

>Unlike Geoff it sometimes takes two or three presses of the restart
>button to get things going again.

No, for me one reset is always enough. Now I'm wondering if there may
still be seating issues with your card...

>I'm also having problems with getting the machine to sleep,
>currently it will always hang if I put it to sleep manually or
>automatically. I only use it in OS X.

I continue to have no sleep problems in Mac OS X, but sleep
effectively doesn't work at all under Mac OS 9. (Which, as I noted in
the article, is fine for me on this machine.)

>All these problems started after the machine froze while in the
>middle of a "fast user switch" a few nights ago

I have to admit to not having tried fast user switching: there's only
one of me. ;-)

>I haven't yet written to Sonnet support but I intend to do so this
>evening... if I make any useful progress I will post a follow-up.

I'd be very curious what they have to say: please at least contact me
privately, even if the situation isn't resolved.

Good luck!

gd
--
Geoff Duncan TidBITS Technical Editor <http://www.tidbits.com/>

This article convinced me to get the Duet upgrade as well for my
QuickSilver 2002 to replace the single 800MHz processor it came with.
The first daughtercard arrived, but was defective. Nothing would run
when launched in OSX version 10.3.5. No Mail, Safari, etc. A quick call
to Sonnet Tech Support and they had me boot into 9 to see what would
happen there. I got the same error message Geoff described when he
decided to upgrade his CPUs. (The one which indicated a problem with
processor caches.) So, they issued me an RMA number. I returned the
unit and had another one about 9 days later.

This one works fine except for the items you mentioned. I am unable to
restart. Either I have to shut down then start, or hit the restart
button twice. Sleep in OSX is an issue for me and my system isn't
always successful when waking from sleep in X about half of the time.
If I tap on a key on the keyboard, or press a mouse button, the system
fans start up, but that's it. The system freezes there and won't come
up any further. A couple of restarts and I'm back in business, however.
Tech support at Sonnet had me send them a System Profile report so they
could see if they could figure out what exactly was going on.

You guys are right about the fan noise, though. It's more pronounced,
but it's tolerable for me to work alongside it without too much of a
problem. I really love the speed increase it gives me. It seems to make
OSX run just that much more efficiently. I am very pleased with my
choice and would recommend it to anyone in need of more throughput.

Thanks again for the great review!

Gerald