Rescuing a Crazy MODDED G4 Cube (with scorch marks inside!)
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- Опубліковано 1 лип 2024
- This Macintosh G4 Cube was heavily upgraded, but at what cost? I've had this beautiful machine in my collection for some time, but I've only ever turned it on twice because it's kind of scary inside. Will a magical blue board from Japan bring this computer back to life? Let's find out together!
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Stratos High-Power Cube VRM: artmix.com/products/product/s...
#macintosh #g4 #cube - Наука та технологія
Man people in japan love their macs
Mac OS was also ahead of Microsoft as far as foreign language support goes, so Macs were more preferable to Japanese earlier on.
Entry level iPhone is free with 24 month contract in Japan (for around $21 a month mind you), yet around 41% of all phones are still feature phones. So their market share comes down to exclusive deals with operators and heavy subsidies, plus the fact that most of electronics is very expensive there. Most people won't go out of their way to buy Android phone when they already got iPhone for free. Nothing to do with quality.
there's a argument happing here
@@xnonsuchx Yeah I still find shitty translation / no translation at all in some parts of Windows 10 to this day. Although I do not use either in my language, instead using English, my experience so far with macOS shows that it has way better translation.
Things from Japan always appear to be lost through shipping for a while then it just shows up out of nowhere. I wish postal companies would better track international packages
The two things I'd do would be: add an SSD and replace the stock optical drive. 10/10 awesome video as always!
Thank you!
100% agree 👌
I definitely agree.
Though it might be interesting to find out why the chassis was mangled a bit, and why that hole is there.
First that Macintosh is locked to a 40 gig hard drive and a 80 gig hard drive depending on the model you can bypass the lockout by formatting the drive in another Mac
I second the idea. Stock optical drive is the only option I can thing of that wouldn't feel as a cheap hack on the otherwise blank slot.
Definitely put in an SSD. As far as the space for the optical drive, I think a replacement slot-loading dvd burner would be perfect, if you can find one.
An ssd for 0 seek time would help this quite nicely with performance & general use for sure.
Putting in a faster gpu perhaps as well if possible too get.
@Robert F I don't think the ATI Radeon HD 3650 will fit the Cube and the Geforce 6200 needs flashing and has no ADC connector. The best would be the Nvidea Geforce 3 which performs best, is actively cooled and fits without any modification
@Robert F I followed some discussions from Cube owners on graphics cards that could fit the Cube and developed a little list as follows:
@@wk9205 I"m honestly sure if your list got cut off or if it's just an empty list. At the very least, their original cards should fit.
@@eDoc2020 It indeed got cut off. Lets try again:
@@eDoc2020 I used a copy paste text from an excel file, but that did not get into the published message.
ATI Rage 128 Pro 16 MB. Stock card
Nvidea Geforce 2MX 32 MB. with large Cube heatsink its OK, with smaller heatsink it get very hot
Radeon 7500 (RV200) 32 MB. Not compatible with Cube's faceplate. Gets very hot
ATI Radeon 32 MB VRAM
"128GB" hard drive because that's the maximum that the open firmware can see, the drive is actually 320GB
Oh good catch
The Intech Hi-Cap driver circumvents this limitation.
Quick question: How's the cursed Mac SE doing, after the recapping?
AS5 *is* slightly electrically conductive as it heats up. I still recommend to people with exposed-core applications like this, even if they're protected, to either nailpolish the smd components or to use the 25 gram large syringe of Ceramique 2 you can buy off eBay for $7. I've had run-ins with SD5 causing all sorts of weird glitches on exposed-core stuff like that in a couple machines in the past, and as much as some people wish to say it's not conductive, it does indeed become so heated up as the thermals rise and resistance drops.
You can get a 240GB SSD for cheap, and a full-size IDE to SATA adapter for not much at all. maxing out the RAM would be ideal, and dropping in an AGP GeForce 6200 with a BIOS flash for Mac use would be a wise decision. a heatsink upgrade to something with a fan for the 6200 would be ideal, and adding in the fan provided with the VRM will only help to keep everything happy. the 6200 upgrade wouldn't have made much more heat than the Radeon or GeForce cards that originally shipped with the machines and didn't use enough power at load to facilitate a VRM swap, so it shouldn't cause any unreasonable power load by adding it in.
The 6200 is a great card, but will likely have wake from sleep issues. The 256MB FX5500 is slightly faster for games (128-bit vs 64-bit memory bus) and wakes fine, though not quite as good for Core Image (not that you'll be using the Cube for productivity really). Neither is supported in OS 9 though. The R7500 is a good all-round compromise - OS9/X support, Quartz Extreme, passively cooled, ADC, looks stock, decent-ish gaming performance. You can 3D-print a faceplate for it (the file's on the MacRumors forum) - fits really well.
There's a Titan copper fan that's a good fit for the 6200/5500. And yeah, it was my understanding that AS5 is conductive too. I use MX-2, as it's cheap, non-conductive, and heatsink paste is much of a muchness thermal conductivity wise.
You should probably add some noctua fans because the g4 cube was quite infamous for overheating.
Deon Denis not really
If ever there were a machine that needed an optical drive, it's the Cube! :) So I'd source a compatible DVD drive if I were you. Also, definitely an SSD would be a good choice to replace the failing (loud, hot, power hungry) HDD. Thanks for the great video!
Fully agree here. Just the necessary future proofing (SSD) and the mandatory DVD replacement if possible. Not sure that sounds great for a vid, though, so maybe a different video card could be an interesting upgrade path, like a GeForce 6200? :)
@@esseferio Right, like maybe replacing the HDD with SSD would have mitigated the need to exchange the VRM ? Kill two birds with one stone
@@shh1234 Except the old VRM had caught fire. :)
@@esseferio I wonder if he could adapt an old IDE slot-loader from the late PPC laptops to fit in the cube, I bet they're easier to get a hold of than the original 5.25 drive.
@@shh1234 No way. The old VRM would blow up again, and as happened to me, took the motherboard with it. The Sonnet CPU upgrade takes a lot of additional juice.
Always loved the Cube. Maybe one day I'll be able to get one for my collection!
I would Install an SSD, Replace the fan with Noctua, and find a slot loading DVD drive
I was always envious of the g4 cube upgrades if I would have had the money back in the day I would have got the dual CPU option. Maybe upgrade the graphics card to a G-Force 6200 AGP card and upgrade the hard drive to a SSD.
On that VRM, it looked like there was an additional fan header for the supplied fan, looked low profile too, maybe having the bottom fan and then the other on the top of the heatsink would improve thermals even further, in a kinda push pull setup.
It was awesome to see a cube in bits, not many people do that anymore and it really goes to show how much R&D goes into building them.
I've never seen this Mac before. Absolutely beautiful!
call druaga1 and install an ssd XD
YES
I love how compact and this thing is. Such a lovely little cube!
SSD, GPU upgrade, and maybe a Noctua fan to keep it all cool
I have the same 1.2GHz machine! I was lucky in the fact that I found it at a GoodWill for only $50. So far it's worked great but I'll have to check if I have the stock VRM in there as I doubt the person who upgraded the processor did anything with that. Great video btw!
Such a joy to take these classic machines to their limit. Great vid.
Surely there's room for a Jazz drive in there.
🤣
Your videos are fun to watch. I like seeing these older Apple computers.
The fact that they fit a full sized AGP card in a case that small is pretty funny though.
I feel like getting an optical drive in there would be good if there's room. There's just something about the way the discs feed in and out of the top that's cool and pretty unique to the Cube.
Alternatively you could put a tissue dispenser in there :)
I love your content man, don’t ever give up! 💖
You 100% deserve more recognition
If the HDD is 5400rpm then DEFINITELY replace it! It will increase the speed of the machine by a huge amount. I have 3 of these and just love looking at them! Timeless design!
Aw man three, that's awesome!!
I don't know about the CD slot, but definitely an SSD is a no brainer! Nice getting the old cube back to... well... cubing.
I was an Apple service engineer at the time when these were new. Loved my Pismo and the PowerMac G4. The Cube was gorgeous, and I always wanted one. And I got one a couple years ago! Never too late :)
A nice video and a sort of memory lane for me. I bought a Cube some time ago and decided to upgrade it with a 1GHz Sonnet CPU board. That worked for about an hour, when the VRM blew up taking with it the motherboard. I managed to get another MB and indeed bought the same VRM from ARTMIX for $150. That worked great, but also my Sonnet CPU blew up after some time. I suspected my Apple LCD monitor to cause problems, so I now use a 19 inch VGA LCD monitor. I managed to find the exact same Sonnet CPU board that you have, so it now runs at 1.2 Ghz. The harddrive was replaced by a SSD. You need to get a SATA to IDE adapter which are for sale on Amazon or Aliexpress for under $10. The SSD works very silent and starts up a little faster. My next upgrade was to replace my optical drive that no longer worked. I found a IDE slimdrive on ebay for $15, took the old one apart and mounted it inside the case of the old drive, so it could be nicely fitted. In your case, you could use an IDE slimdrive as well, but need to create some brackets to properly fit it in. I certainly would not put in anything else than an optical drive, as the CD loader is the charm of the Cube.
You will soon find out that the Airport card is pretty useless. Apart from being extremely slow it does not connect to modern wifi networks. So I took it out and bought a TP-Link WLAN nano router at Amazon and plugged it into the network port of the Cube. Setting it up is easy and it works very fast. Based on a video from a Cube user at Mac Forums, I decided to build the nano router inside the Cube, behind the optical drive. The 5v power comes from the MOLEX cable, and I routed a small RJ 45 cable from the external network connector through the whole that was left after taking out the no longer used modem card, to the nano-router. As the nano-router has no external antenna I had to fit an antenna cable from inside the nano-router to the antenna connectors (the 2 gray ovals on the side of the Cube) so the signal can reach outside the metal casing of the Cube.
I also upgraded the stock ATI graphics card, but most run very hot and don't make much difference if you are running normal apps. Only if you are gaming, an upgrade to a Gefore3 will make a big difference, but these are almost impossible to find.
If you want more info on how to do all this have a look on Mac Forums under PowerPC or you can contact me.
I wish you lots of fun with the Cube. It is good to keep them alive.
Definitely put a SSD in there, a GPU upgrade, and then do a video about trying to run this Cube as your main computer for a week. It will be interesting to see the level of usability this beautiful machine has to offer after all those years.
The G4 cube was the first real sign of the Apple design & build philosophy that they still use to this day. Make innovative & groundbreaking machines, remove user upgrade features, charge a premium.
Fan still looked dirty AF lol. Compressed air is your friend.
Considering all the other long-gone aftermarket cards that were once made to upgrade the Cube, it's nuts that there's are folks like Stratos still doing these things. Well done.
Get yourself a Voodoo Mac card for that sweet early 2000s Mac Gaming.
2 things spring to mind immediately: 1) You are not installing a VRM module, you are installing a VRM (Voltage Regulator Module). & 2). The extra cost is due to the size of the Cube case. The smaller you try to make something, the more expensive it becomes. Not everyone has space for a Power Mac G4. The Cube occupies only 16.5% of the volume of a PowerMac G4.
This is a fantastic video. I never knew you could upgrade a g4 cube like that
Yes, enjoyed the Pismo love at the start, I’m in the process of restoring mine at present. Concur on SSD and a new optical drive for the Cube. Enjoy your channel!
You have to put an optical drive. Nothing like seeing that slow toaster pop.
man that g4 cube got hot as heck
Provided you can make it fit, maybe a as an ambitious replacement for the optical disk, a 5.25" bay adapter for two optical disks but only one of them populated with a slim optical device while the other is used for extra storage from an optical bay tray adapter for SATA disks? Bit of a stretch but depending on slot positioning (if it isn't centrally-located) it might be possible.
Definitely stick an SSD in it and see if you can find a replacement optical drive too! It would be awesome to see it fully working and fully maxed out.
As for the hard drive inside, it may well be bigger than 128GB but that's the maximum these old Macs can address. I have a 160GB drive in my 400MHz Mystic G4 and it only sees it as 128GB.
Very happy to see that VRM is not actually scorched. And it also looks ok. Someone definitely yanked it out sometime in the past and had to resolder it. I really think you could've managed without changing the VRM at all.
Ah yes the strange, quirky "space toaster". Wish it still had it's optical drive in it. That's the best part.
🤣
Reasons to buy it (I did): small, no fan noise, super nice design.
great video as always my guy
SSD for sure. I got a hold of a used one back in 2006. I ended upgrading the HD and video card (with some grinding needed to fit lol) and it gets hot. I ended leaving a fan (with 90s blue led lol [I want to replace it lol) to cool it down since not fan was originally there, some type of passive cooling. So yes SSD so I can pull out my Cube and go along. LoL Good Luck 🤙🏼
I definitely think this deserves to have a SSD, and I think the SD card reader is a great idea. I do have a question. The 4 metal coulums that you had to remove during disassembly. Did they have to go back in to the same spot, or are they interchangeable?
Interchangeable, and in fact the instructions for the new VRM had me leave one out to make room for it.
SSD and stock optical drive. Cool video as always.
Apple could bring this case back for Mini-ITX builds and make bank.
I liked the G4 cube and the Lamp Shade iMac. The Lamp Shade was a weird shape, but in a cool way. :)
The spinning beach ball of death has truly killed me over the years. 💁🏻♂️⚽☠️
I’m curious how loud the fan was and if it seemed to be doing a good job at keeping the temperature under control. It will be even easier to cool without the old hard drive.
My vote is for a new SSD, like everyone else. You could bling it up with an unexpected Jazz drive, but doubt you want to chop the case like the Cursed Mac.
Thank you for another fun video!
A friend is passing on her Cube to me in a month or so (she’ll be dropping it off on her way past to another destination). The Cube was the Mac I would have bought due to it’s looks over power, but I had recently got myself a G4 Tower at the time, so didn't need & couldn’t afford one. Still, nice to have one donated. It can join my 17" PowerBook as a “machine I wanted but didn’t buy at the time but I have now”. No idea on specs, but it should be in good condition. Looking forward to taking on this machine.
Great video!
Bought a Cube new. I still love it.
Excellent video. Wish, I had a G4 Cube in my collection even if, it only had a small stock Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with a 450Mz processor. Would love to see you do a few of the upgrades, I would like to have done to several of my vintage G4 Power PC apple computers which are as follows: 1) Add an SSD drive (want to make sure that, I get all the right parts and connectors to go from having a HDD for either a laptop or desktop model to a working SSD; 2) Make three partitions on a single HDD or SSD and load different operating systems perhaps OS X 10.3, OS X 10.4, and OS 10.5; and lastly 3) Load a version of Linux for Power PC computers on your Cube with a good step by step guide.
SSD, optical drive (it just looks so cool), and LEDs. Yes, it should light up:)
I call it, the next video will be: Crazy Modded iMac G4
Hi end capacitors in that new board
The cube was my favorite design.
I have a 1.42GHz G4 Mac mini and you definitely wanna stick with Tiger on G4s. Leopard is a bit too sluggish, so better suited to G5s (which is why Leopard won't even normally install on slower G4s (
100% put an SSD in it. For noise, performance, and power consumption. You can get IDE->Sata bridges so you aren't limited to just IDE drives. As for the optical.. i'd just try finding a slot-loader DVD-RW drive. And maybe see if you can get a dust filter on the other side of the fan, or even replace the fan with a noctua fan to make it as quiet as possible.
New video card! Googling shows that people have been able to get an ATI 9800SE/Pro inside their g4 cubes.
I love weird computers like this, and i love upgrading them to their max. So i'm curious to see how it turns out.
The handle isn't supposed to pop up with the push of a button, the thing you were pushing was the lock anchor. On a non-faulty cube you push the handle in for it to pop up (you did that once and it didn't pop up, so it's definitely faulty). It's probably just a missing spring.
Definitely add an SSD. If it's possible, fitting a 5 1/4" floppy drive in the CD-ROM drive slot would be hilarious.
Most definitely put an SSD in there! Is it going to require a SATA-to-IDE adapter? Would be interesting to find out! Also, I think you should source a stock optical drive to also put it in there, or anything close to it if you can. Please do it if you're able to!
best treat would be to incorporate a mac mini into the cube core housing.
You should add an optical drive, preferably a DVD, inside that bay.
Get that disc drive working and use an SSD, make this Mac scream!
I’d love to see some solid state storage.
I’ve been having terrible luck trying to upgrade my machines lately and I’d love a solution that actually works.
They should make a new cube with the M1 in it since that can dominate while passively cooled and has no expandability anyway.
You should install an Nvidia 6200 graphics card to support full core image. It greatly speeds the machine up. There are even pre-flashed cards available on ebay.
Since it's nowhere near stock at this point, I'd say make it more better. Definitely add the SSD for a start. Maybe you can find a replacement DVD drive to slot in there. Hey, I like spinning media, so sue me. XD
Max it out with the highest hardware it can support and a SSD. See what the highest version of OSX you can put on it.
I put an SSD into my Cube, it was not an easy experience. I really envy you that Sonnet card.
Suggestion: DiskWarrior does wonder on disks (as long as they are formatted in HFS+)
Loved it! Add an SSD.
I have a cube with a 1.4ghz PowerLogix upgrade board but the original VRM, I may have to look into upgrading the VRM as a preventative measure
this guy is the best person
It would be nice to see an SSD upgrade.
I have 3 cubes and would love to upgrade at lest one of them.
Put a cd drive in and an SSD for the os. Great video thank you 🙂
Another thing about the other PowerMac that may or may not be dead that I just thought of. If the ram speed is mismatched or the speed is incorrect for that Mac it could make it not boot or cause it to be unstable. I have a G4 MDD and it will only work with 333mhz, even if I put 400mhz in it to see if it will run it at 333mhz it will not work.
IDE to MSATA i did it with a 1.67Ghz PowerBook G4 at it worked great!
Cool little Apple.. SSD upgrade is a must. Does it have AGP? I think I have an Nvidia geforce 3 ti something. Love to see any performance and usability upgrades to this setup. Thanks for the interesting video.
I suggest getting a normal iMac G3 dvd rom drive, if it needs the eject repair do it and install it in the cube, the cube has a finicky dvd drive and they are hard to find. I also suggest getting an IDE to SATA adapter and put in a 128gb sad to keep it a bit modded, the ssd won’t make it too faster but it will be more reliable. I also recommend installing Mac OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.4.11
Very cool.
Sean Put A SSD With 4 Partitions 9.2.2 ,Tiger , Leopard , Snow Leopard beta , Go With The Optical Drive Nice Video Great Job
I have a Cube that I upgraded to OS X Leopard 11 years ago, but haven’t really used it since. Any suggestions? The hardware is pretty much stock, maybe I should keep it that way. I guess I should see if it still even boots.
You should make this the ultimate g4 cube. You should find every single possible upgrade for it and make this machine the most balls to the wall variant 😂
Yes! 🤘
Action Retro do it do it. Come on DO IT
me watching the video 16 minutes after upload:
speed.
i. am speed.
Fun to see the original mac mini dna...
It would be fun to see a run at the 'fastest G4 Cube Ever!!' :)
I'd say this would be in the same spirit as the Cursed SE. Just take it as far as you can go.
Did you polish the acrylic?
Sort of kind of a proto Mac Mini - or at least that's what I think when seeing the dissasembly.
It was an homage to the NeXT crowd. ;)
I think it's time for a ssd and a slim dvd to make it complete and a bit more modern
I vote for an SSD and a slot loading dvd drive - at the very least it can be a multimedia center to play cds and dvds.
Hey man, for that optical drive I'm almost certain that a CW-8124-B or C will work? You can still get NOS Apple drives for cheap, I've used them in my tray loader iMacs. That Cube is soooo beautiful:)
If possible, put in a blu-ray drive and a suitably fast network card and use it for a proto-Apple TV! Would look awesome in any home media setup.
notanimposter: Surprisingly, old 10/100 ethernet can carry a couple of streams of 1080p BluRay.
would love to see if you could actually use this machine with the web, using something like tenfourfox and leopard webkit. Maybe some youtube playback tests and photoshop would be cool too.
you could also upgrade the video card with something like a 32 MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX officially or unofficially you could put in a 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6200 but you have to re-flash it
I recently revived my G4 Cube that I had purchased new in 2000. I replaced the HDD because it was really whining, but it works like new. I actually put OS9 back on it, which is what it originally shipped with. I would like to replace the HDD with an SSD, but can you get IDE-based SSDs?
One thing: the "button" on the handle to open the Cube is not a button. It is a fixed latch; to open the handle you push down on the handle part, then it pops up. So I think your handle might not be broken?
Cheers!