Building the World's Fastest Power Mac G4, Part 1 

You installed the ssd on slower IDE bus. The MDD has 3 IDE buses, 33MHz for the optical drives, 66MHz for the hard drives under the optical drives, and 133MHz for the hard drives that sit above the CPU when the case is closed. Your MDD is missing the HDD cage that sits above the CPU, which is unfortunate. But if you manage to 3D print a bracket to fit in the pegs left over there, you will have a nice speed boost. I made the same mistake with my MDD and when I found out the bus speeds, it was a nice upgrade. Also awesome video as always.

I’m here for the Macs and the hand gestures! 😄

“FedEx lost it” is a euphemism for “someone at fedex stole it”.

The MDD was the Mac that I swooned over when I was young. Years later I'd own four of them and was my main machine from 2005-2010. Replacing the 60mm fans in those power supplies was mandatory.

I'm so happy you liked my book! FedEx is trash for losing that Mac though. It was a fun machine, mine was loud, but fun. I have no idea how people used it as an audio workstation back in the day.

I had a maxed out dual 1.42 MDD, 2GB ram, a Sonnet Tempo PCI SATA card, which made an Intel 160GB bootable natively.. Also, a Radeon 9650 out of a G5 (you have to modify the traces to the pins, but it's very easy)... The Dual 1.42 comes with a much nicer giant copper heatsink to deal with the increased heat. You can also install two small fans between the heatsink and the rear of the case to aid with extracting the heat from the processor (and you can mount a fan controller in a pci-e slot to control the speed). Anyway, fun video to watch!

You need to fill those PCI-X slots! Get the SSD onto SATA! Add an SFP port! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM DIIIIIIIIIIISK CAAAAAAAAAAARDDDDDD!!!!

I'm a PC guy through and through but I interacted with Macs at school from 1995-2008 and I've always wondered about this side of computing. Happy to find a mad scientist on the Mac side. Great content!!

Minecraft 1.2.5 was the *last* version of Minecraft where the single-player was a true single player, and not a local multiplayer server. It probably doesn't make much difference for performance on these old systems, but the old single-player was extremely polished, and it took a long time for the "singleplayer is multiplayer" versions to catch up.

*shelves plans to do the same thing* I got myself an MDD recently, fully boxed, great condition, top spec, fully working, delivered for a total of £140. (No idea what that is in other currencies) from what I've seen, that's not bad

I have to wonder how fedex "loses" a package that size.

I hope he makes another G5 video. Didn’t those things top out at quad core with 16gb of ram? I want to see how much further he could take one of those.

I've got a dual 1.25GHz MDD in a very good shape, costed me ~$13. Wanted to upgrade it, but stuff expensive.

I like how you compared the performance of this to a chromebook 😂

I would love to see more of the software and actual professional uses for these expensive macs like photo/video editing and coding. It would be interesting to see how wait times/UI/workflow for professionals has changed through each decade to do things.

Just found your channel tonight - 07/09/2022 - and you're giving me some serious inspiration. I just got my first "modern" Mac in forever a couple months ago, a 2011 Mac Mini, and I've upgraded it from the paltry 2GB of the slightly slower RAM to 16GB of the fast RAM available for the machine. I've also changed the 500GB "spinning disk" HDD to a 1TB SSD. It's running like gangbusters on High Sierra. I just wish it did OS 9.2.2. Well, after watching this video, I believe I know what my next Mac Quest is going to be. But, following the comment from @Alan Hinkson below, I'm going to use the faster IDE bus if at all possible for the IDE to SSD conversion. Thanks for showing off your projects, it's been great. I just wish I'd have found you LAST year! Also... the "Cursed SE/30" is flat out amazing. I love it!!!

I really love these kinds of videos. I love taking old hardware and maxing them out. I have a hobby of putting modern hardware in vintage computer shells. If i get a computer that doesn't work, i'll put in a new PC and make it a sleeper PC. Like a mini-ITX in the Dreamcast.

Bwahahah... that 2D dock trick brings back memories. I know this is Leopard on this G4, but gosh darn I miss Snow Leopard. Apple lost me after Lion, that was a change for the worst in my mind... if I could have Snow Leopard on a new Mac, it'd definitely be a 'shut up and take my money' moment.

You can use AppleScript to switch between Mac OS X and Classic. On Leopard make a script like this: do shell script "bless --folder9 '/Volumes/Classic/System Folder' -setBoot && shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges And then on Mac OS 9 make a script like this: tell application "Startup Disk" activate set startup system folder alias to alias "Leopard:System:Library:CoreServices:BootX" quit end tell tell application "Finder" restart end tell That's what I did when I was using the unsupported version of Mac OS 9 on my eMac.

AR: I guess we're going with Tiger. My brain: don't say it, don't say it... Me: UPPERCUT! My brain: sigh...

I did something like this back in 2004. I couldn't afford a new Mac so I bought a used dual G4 Mac and upgraded to a Dual 1 GHz G4 (Sonnet daughter card) and added SATA drives for a lot less. That machine lasted a number of years running OS X.

I actually once owned an MDD with the dual 1.42ghz cpus (the top spec). A friend gave it to me and was a pretty cool system

I love how close this is on the geek bench test to my powermac g5 dual processor 2.0

For throwing a 2.5" drive into old 3.5" bays where the absolute position to be kept, I use an older HPE part, 654540-001. It's a metal brace with a little extension daughterboard, goes for around 9$ a piece. It's originally designed for adapting external bays. Your 3D printed part looks decently the same, do you have the file for it available somewhere?

Personally I'm partial to the Quicksilver design, but the mirrored drive doors make the hand gestures hit me in a sort of visual stereo that is completely awe inspiring.

27:44 if you install PowerPC Linux, yes, those upgrades are well worth it because u end up with a computer that can run most up to date software (Debian PPC runs Firefox, Telegram, ThunderBird, Libreoffice etc, well up to 5 years ago which is a 15 year boost if you take into account the G4 MDD is from 2002)

and the 3d dock icons look way more modern and sophisticated than the simple crap everyone is using now

I love these videos. Please keep doing stuff like this. It’s fascinating.

I installed an SSD into my iMac G4 and I'm always surprised that older Mac OS X can find SSDs.

A fantastic upgrade; I saw that the card used to upgrade the 7855 to 7848 cpu have a 3 'level cache of only 1Mb, so an MDD card running at 867Mhz was used (of which the original cpus are at 933Mhz). If they used that of the 1.25Ghz or 1.47Ghz MDDs you had a 3 'level cache of 2Mb for each of the processors. Certainly a larger cache guarantees better performance with those more complex applications with larger code. But now you should do some tests with applications, not just games but professional software such as Final Cut, Photoshop, Pages etc.

Every time action retro uploads I grab a drink and lean back in my chair.

They weren't discontinued in June 2002, they weren't even launched then- August 2002! Great machines, had the dual gig.

I really enjoyed my MDD back in the day. I could say I miss it from time to time lol. Good memories of younger years. Excellent video!

I couldn't hear what the CPU upgrade was. What was it and who built it?

There are two main versions of the PowerMac G4 MDD and they are the version with FireWire 400 only (Mac OS 9 supported) and the version with FireWire 400 and 800 (does not support Mac OS 9 natively), but Mac OS 9 Lives will work on both main models.

I had a single processor 1GHz model. So not all of them were dual processor

About 10 yrs back I built a MacIIG4 - FrankenMac... : I got a G4 MDD mainboard and 1.25 G. processor, no case, I had already successfully built a G3 into an old MacII case (got a bunch of MacIIs back in '95, still got most of them, some were empty) the G4 presents a puzzle in that for whatever reason Apple flipped the arrangement of the PCI slots to the other side of the M.board, the biggest issue was mounting the heatsink; part of it hangs on the case - which I didnt have, to even look at, I wanted to use water cooling anyway, so I fabricated a bracket holding on the 3 holes in the Proc. card holding down a brass cooling head with tubes running though it (got pics) I use a slot loading DVD drive through the floppy drive holes in the front after cutting the divider between them, Overall its been a fun project, a lot of nitpicky details to get it work, I still use it, although I recently have to rebuild the cooling head due to flow problems causing overheating. Great to see a good video on what people are doing with old Macs :-)

Overclocked my old PowerMac G4 Quicksilver! Took the 866 dual processor to 1.08 Ghz with just a little soldering to a resistor set on the CPU board. Made a big difference for iPhoto importing back then. Wonder if the MDD CPU boards can be overclocked in a similar way.

Moral of the story: when shipping a functional computer, _always_ label the box as "For parts" or "Broken" and send an E-Mail to the person who is to receive your article saying the machine isn't actually broken, it's just to deter people from stealing it. Unless your courier decides to treat it with mad disrespect and toss it because _If it's already broken, how much worse would yeeting the box do? _*_YEET!_*

Hi Sean. This is the first Mac I did a video on. I have the 1.42 GHz version. I got another 867 MHz MDD from a guy on Craigslist who just gave it to me. I also got a 23” Cinema Display that I don’t use for reasons. I upgraded my video to an ATI 9600 Pro with 256 MB. Dual DVI unless i want use my Apple DVI to ADC box to hook up the Cinema. I use a DVI to HDMI adapter to connect my HD monitor and i do get 1920x1080 resolution. This card is from a G5 but there was a retail version that’s cross platform compatible. I also got a PCI SATA card to support SATA natively. It works in OS 9 and X so if I wanted to install the hacked OS 9, I could. The MDD is an interesting Mac as it has separate IDE busses that run at 33, 66, 133 and 167. The 167 bus is in the forward drive bay so make sure your SSD is plugged into that, as that will grant it the best performance. Now, the downside. After a year I had to have my PSU recapped. The MDDs had either Delta or AcBel PSUs. I lucked out because I know AcBel makes server grade PSUs and that’s what I got. I sent it out and now it runs like a champ. One more thing. Good on you for running Leopard. I know you’re running TenFourFox, but in March, Cameron said he was winding down active development on it. I use Leopard-WebKit which is WebKit (Safari 11) that runs on PPC Leopard, and petty soon, Snow Leopard. They also have a Mail replacement that you can use. Pretty nice and if I need to do real work I can. Great video as usual!

Love the MDD macs! I've got the 2x1.42ghz one sitting at home, loved growing up on that!

Wow! Mac OS 9 is super snappy! I had a single cpu 1.2 MDD 2003, it was the first Mac I bought new! Over the years I upgraded it with a pair of 10,000rpm Ultra-SCSI drives in a RAID and some other bits. It goes to show how much a difference fast drives make in a Mac. You mentioned that you couldn't get your external drive to work, some of the G4s couldn't access larger drives if I recall correctly. The big 120mm fan swap was something I played around with. Back in the day it was hard to track down a fan that had built in speed control, I think I ended up using Bresink software to monitor the temperature and control the fan speed (although it was a long time ago...). The original Delta fan was actually pretty good and few others could push the same amount of air. Verax fans for the PSU was the real noise killer. I was tempted to remove the metal covering the four wind-tunnel holes in the front of the machine, and I thought that maybe these were originally planned to be open or perforated. In the end I removed the speaker and attached it to the roof inside the enclosure using velcro and the opening gave an extra air vent. The speaker grill clips in and out. I seem to recall there was an another 2-pin power connector on the mlb that an additional fan could be attached to. In all it's an amazing and upgradeable piece of kit and I regret ever selling it. One other thing, back in the day I remember hearing that someone had managed to get OS 9 running on a G5, do you know if this is a thing? Thanks for posting such great content, I love the channel and the memories it brings - good times!

There actually were single CPU MDDs, my MDD shipped with a single 1GHz CPU but I upgraded it to dual 1.25GHz CPUs.

Sean... if you hook that SSD up to the ATA/100 bus it will be faster. If you need the drive carrier for the side, let me know, i have a few laying around. Great machine, just got a dual 1.25 MDD FW800 myself!

I was going to do this exact same thing with my G4 MDD, but it experienced logic board failure :( I had a neat writeup on my blog, so it's glad to see this exact thing being done! Good luck on the GPU pin modification/firmware flash!

This advice can make the G4 MDD very quiet to the point that it looks like a "normal" computer. Replace the 60mm fans in the PSU with quieter models, replace the 120mm fan and add 2 60mm fans behind the heatsink. Now you have a very quiet MDD but if you want the cpus to always be cool you have to build a wind tunnel around the heatsink. It would take a 3D printer for a better job but I made it out of laminated cardboard and held together with electrician's tape. In this way you can also earn 10 degrees celsius in put on the cpu !!! In the strictest minimum noise, much like a new G5 or a Mac Pro ....

That's a nice upgrade! I'm still looking for the Powerlogix 1.1ghz PPC 750gx upgrade for my B/W G3. For some reason I figured the 500mhz G4 upgrade was better than that all those years ago.

I got into macs because of the IMac g4 and it’s beautiful design. Now I can’t wait to buy a G4 on eBay and modify it so I can put an M1 in it. (If I was extremely lucky)

Quicksilver was more gorgeous, but this Mirror was more powerful. Great video, dude.

Not all PowerMac G4 MDD had dual processors, as there were a single 1.0Ghz and 1.25Ghz models. The wind tunnel noise was the whining small fans in the power supplies of the first MDDs released in August 2002 and discontinued in January 2003. Apple had a replacement warranty for the fans for a limited time. The FW 800 models and the MDD 2003 models did not have this problem as they used different power supplies with fans that did not have the whining issue.

Mac OS 9 does not support FireWire 800, but that is why Mac OS Lives exist to I think disable the FireWire 800 port.

I just got three of these from a guy who used to run a studio that I recorded my first two studio albums at in the early 2000s. My old bandmate joined another band after that one fizzled out and his band apparently has some lost songs sitting on one or more hard drives that used to be in the G4 mdds... (got 2 bags with about 20 hard drives) I know at least one of them is firewire 800. Only one working power supply in the bunch though so I'm going to have to start learning!! I haven't worked on a vintage mac since the mid 90s! I think if I have enough time and enough coffee and late nights I'll get at least one to work! Don't be surprised if I reach out and ask you questions on twitter!

You said "space opera" - checking out the books now. Thanks.

Yes, You are missing the rear drive bracket, and you should plug your SSD into the ATA 100 interface at the bottom back of the logic board. You have it plugged into the ATA-66 bus. Also when I upgrade to SSDs I call the DASD 'Macintosh SSD.' It seems appropriate. Also: In Minecraft windowed mode, if you start up with the window as small as possible, you will get higher frame rates, and then when you make the window larger, the frame rates will drop only slightly, vs starting up with a large window. If you take away the desktop picture, you will increase your frame rates. See you on your server. ( it looks really cool. )

Fun fact: this evil spirit is the first ever sentient ominously hovering arm to create a channel on youtube

That is too funny I was just thinking about I have not fired up my G4 in a while and then I see this video !

the king of hand gestures

I love G4 and G5 era macs the most

These are really fun to watch, man.

Fridge ice tray is actually good for keeping screws.

It ain't miles per gallon, it's smiles per gallon, remember that.

I'd like to do the same to my MDD. Do you have the links to the hardware you used?

My Highschool had theses in the film and video class back in the day.

I owned one of these beasts... it was indeed a thing of beauty. It's a damn shame that Apple hasn't carried through it's serviceability ethic into the current day.

Ah, the beginning of the cheese grater aesthetic. I had a QS 2001 and QS 2002. :)

I had one of these at work from 2002-2004. It was the only thing that could run Lotus Notes well in the entire company.

G4 upgrades are my favorite. Plotting to bring my dual 1.33ghz Digital Audio home from work so I can use it more often. Just brought home my 7600/700 g4 this morning.

23:59 The thing is actually, 1.2.5 was the last version of Minecraft to not use an internal server as this was implemented in 1.3.1. So it's actually a completely single-player game, not sure if it would've affected performance. Although the server is configured to run on a separate thread in newer versions so honestly who knows.

We should now say not "can it ran Doom?" But "can it run Minecraft?" (Sorry for bad English)

Love your Channel man! Early LGR vibes man!

You think a modern Chromebook could really keep up with that dual 2ghz g4? Maybe in modern tasks, but surely not on anything like heavy duty software?

I have a suggestion to streamline your video production: film your arm making several gestures then returning to a neutral pose in front of a green screen. Then you can record everything and do your voice over offline and match your hand gestures as needed!

Got to love the weird beep :)

The G5 looks much better than the G4 IMO. In fact, the G5 might be the best looking computer Apple has ever made.

Upgrades are always so satisfying

You can get a PCI SATA card and flash it to get support. You could use it with a SATA SSD and it'll boot as a primary boot volume. Hrutkay Mods made a video on it.

I have both a G3 B&W, and a 1.42 DP G4, and boy do I love the wind tunnel.

this is the apple I miss, not the mainstream crap they put out today, this apple actually went by think different

kempq meets macbook guy (now 8bit guy) meets lgr and Adrien's basement.

I had a Fed Ex driver put an empty box on a customer's porch. You could see in the surveillance video that the box was open when he threw it on the porch. I called Fed Ex about it and they didn't seem to care. The driver may not be the one who stole it but he knew it was gone. They just paid me the insurance and moved on. They really just don't care.

Love your videos, i had a given dual 867 one that wasn’t working after trying many things I found out the processor had trouble so I bought a dual 1,25 g proc but even if the mac works now the speed is down to 1g proc speed. Thx for all your infos as a mac lover repairing them for years you give me more infos to try as SSD didn’t exist back then for ex

those hands moving around all the time LOL

Such a dream setup

Mine still works well , as a photoshop machine that is. This machine is a bit complex and broke the gigaflop barrier with margin so flr some things it still outperforms my ryzen 5, but for most not. For video editing it is still an ok machine but on the other hand mac software always been very good on that

28:15 I do remember my Dual 1.8GHz G5 scored 1942 with Geekbench 2. Surprised the extra 200MHz got his up to 2012

Sometimes when I'm bored, I overlay the Charlie Brown teacher voice over your videos. If you get the loop length and cadence just right, it gets mesmerizing.

just found this channel and instantly subbed, luv this stuff

I got the impression that you installed the noctua fan backwards

My MDD Dual 1,42 with 256 gb. ssd, dvd-rw, Ati 9700 128 mb,2x1Gb ram, power efficient supply and Enermax controllbar cooler is fast, not loud and consums only 100 Watt energy.Check your power consumption, wenn you are thru with your project.

The hand motions are a bit jarring, but I love the content!

Looks like that MDD is missing the right drive holder. I'm not sure if this was addressed in the video (sorry, I kinda skipped through a lot of it) but you'd probably get a fair bit more disk speed by putting your boot disk on the other ATA bus - the left side bus is ATA-66, whereas the right side bus runs at ATA-133. That aside, it's super cool to see a dual 2GHz G4 machine, especially dual 7448s with the 1MB L2 cache.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I believe the IDE interface nearest the CPU is faster spec and is designed for the OS drive. However it looks like your missing the sled to mount it under the powersupply and between the fan.

Can it run Virtual PC 7 for Mac?

I actually have one of these with the mirrors, with the ball speakers and the clear apple studio crt monitor, all in the showroom of my computer shop, It plays the classic 2000s music it had on it when i got it :)

Since its upgradeable, the ideal configuration would be to toss out the G4 motherboard, put in an Intel quadcore i7 motherboard, upgrade the RAM to 16 GB and install a dedicated GPU graphics card with a 1 TB ssd. Keeping the case of course. Something like the a1398 MBP quadcore i7 in desktop form. Running Catalina, even Big Sur. You can’t upgrade modern Macs at all, so it would be someone’s dream project. Like hot rodding a classic car!

actually, it wasn't until Minecraft 1.3 that they had the server/singleplayer combined, you are running 1.2.5 which should be pure single player, so i don't see any issue with running singleplayer on here to see the performance

Now if we could find a way to remove the 2gb RAM ceiling from the G4 machines, you would totally steamroll a lower end G5 with this machine, and use 1/4 the power!

Beautiful machines, I have one with a full ProTools system installed and other 2 machines for spare parts...yes, they are noisy.

The thing about it getting lost in transit and you having to buy another one is something I can relate to, but in my case, it's usually with the seller on Carousell selling to someone else without telling me and everyone else who had sent offers, or when I get outbid on eBay.

finaly someone decided to take a spin at maxing out the G4