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

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Today we have the most powerful G4 machine that Apple ever released, and we're using a custom-built CPU to turn it into the fastest G4 in the world! Well, one of them at least. But we're not stopping here - this is part one in our quest to build the world's fastest G4 Power Macintosh!
Thanks Steve @Mac84 for taking Dual G5 benchmarks for comparison!
🍎 Chromaspace: Conscript for Kindle: www.amazon.com/Chromaspace-Co...
🍎 Chromaspace: Conscript DOS edition: www.chromaspace.net/dos-ebook...
🍎 Mac OS 9 for unsupported G4s: macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-...
🍎 How to set your dock to 2D in Leopard: osxdaily.com/2007/12/24/chang...
🍎 Minecraft optimized for PowerPC Macs: macintoshgarden.org/games/min...
🍎 The Action Retro classic Minecraft server! actionmc.ml/
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💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com/shop/actionretro
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#Macintosh #PowerPC #G4

[@A7777777lan]

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.

[@ActionRetro]

Oh thanks for this!

[@aa-au]

​@@ActionRetro I was going to suggest this also, as the upright 'U' shape hard drive bracket is missing behind the large fan, as well as the IDE 133Mhz cable (with the blue stripe?) can be connected straight onto the logic board near the rear. Or you can add an ACARD IDE PCI card but this may be the same bus speed of 133Mhz.

[@obineg5752]

@@aa-au the regular bus should have 100 and not 66, but that´s right, the IDE at the front is 133 and hence almost as fast as using an SATA 150 PCI card . however, SATA cards could make use of the 64 bit PCI slot which gives you some 10% more - and there are even SATA-300 cards from sonnet/seritek. apropos: both of the HD IDE buses in the MDD require master/slave, so if you use 2 IDE2SATA adapters, at least one of them must have an option to set it to "master" (the 3 euro ones dont have this.)

[@daspec]

Don't expect huge gains from a cheap IDE to SATA adapter or even from a PCI Sata1 or Sata2 card that could support boot on this MAC. I suggest you get a full length PCI-X SCSI controller (compatible with MAC) and connect it to an SD2SCSI card with a 128GB SD. The PCI-X has double the throughput of the regular PCI bus, so technically you can reach speeds of SATA-2

[@amdintelxsniperx]

@@daspec so 266 mbps give or take so just shy of 300

[@lukeweeks3470]

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

[@growtopiajaw]

I always wondered about the hand gestures. He used to show his face in the video in the early days.

[@YangiTheCat]

🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙🤚🤚👆☝🤚👋👋☝👉👉👈🤙🤙

[@theinterportal]

Love the content and all, but the hand gestures trigger me :/

[@error4159]

Hand gestures and Mac's, got to love it

[@fmefw9892]

He Is and undercover Italian

[@megan_alnico]

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.

[@jvnelvlam00n]

how do you even lose something that big? i dont understand how it even happens. id understand for a smaller package.

[@megan_alnico]

@@jvnelvlam00n I packed it in the box from my P-500A case. I guess it was heavy and looked like a gaming computer? That's my only theroy.

[@DavidMarvin]

@@jvnelvlam00n Always make sure the label on the box is secure. If the label comes off and there is no info in the box, it becomes 'lost' and it gets sold at an auction.

[@dasoffendor]

There was a company called Verax which made a "silent" conversion kit with a special heatsink and fans that ran super super quiet. They are insanely rare these days but they did do the trick.

[@darthrevan2063]

@@jvnelvlam00n stolen and claimed as lost.

[@Derpy1969]

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

[@DavidMarvin]

Always make sure the label on the box is secure. If the label comes off and there is no info in the box, it becomes 'lost' and it gets sold at an auction.

[@xgford94]

And put it on eBay…..and purchase by …

[@BilisNegra]

@@xgford94 Yeah, he purchased the same unit that got lost!!!... NO, of course he didn't, genius.

[@samuelcolvin4994]

This is why I always tell people to mark my packages as "juniors old baby clothes"

[@rbotton6272]

ikr??

[@dontthroworanges]

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.

[@DavidRavenMoon]

Also my main machine in that time frame!

[@ChrisNova777]

those were the os9 + TIGER years 2005+ up untill about the time windows 7 + snow leopard came out

[@MrSB910]

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!

[@MrSB910]

@iumpeces MDD G4 DP 1.42GHz, and no. Couldn't run classic natively.

[@TimVogel87]

Curious, is the Radeon 9650 faster than a 9800 Pro (128mb) in an MDD?

[@skunch]

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

[@obineg5752]

there is no PCI-X

[@StevenJPiper]

*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

[@WilliamHollinger2019]

Well, 1 pound = 1.50usd so the math let me think. So it is $210 usd.

[@koztech]

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

[@mushroomsamba82]

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

[@jinxterx]

yup, stolen for sure.

[@brandonleon3772]

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

[@MeguRED]

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

[@forceraider451]

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.

[@JakeHambyZ80]

Yep. I bought a 2.5 GHz G5 Quad and 16gb ECC RAM (ECC is optional but supported) and it’s really fast. Fast enough that I installed Gentoo and compile my own apps on it. The later ones have SATA and PCIe slots and they all look cool.

[@amdintelxsniperx]

@@JakeHambyZ80 fun fact you can run slightly more modern gpus on g5s in linux i have an hd6870 in mine

[@joeturner7959]

@@JakeHambyZ80 I met someone from Apple who had a dual G5 Quad for audio, that was a former Apple server. Right next to it, was a prototype with a Core2Duo with a tiny tiny motherboard. The Core2Duo was head and hands faster. The G5 eventually leaked, so I went and cleaned it out for him, and got all the seals perfect. Its been 6 years, and I have not heard from him... Hmmm....

[@kargaroc386]

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.

[@obineg5752]

i still doubt CPU cycles would make a huge difference.

[@joeturner7959]

What video card? Mine has the Radeon 9000 Pro, but I have been unable to find a GeForce for anything reasonable.

[@MattExzy]

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.

[@redfonzie21]

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!!!

[@Charlemagne89]

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!!

[@LazyBunnyKiera]

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.

[@motheroats]

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

[@motheroats]

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.

[@stevenedwardyoung]

This. Love the projects he does, but the obsession with things like Minecraft rather than a broader set of actually useful tasks can get tiring.

[@Riley-uy5pe]

@@stevenedwardyoung it takes a ton of learning and experience to use a lot of pro software like that and it's not worth the effort to do for a dumb youtube video

[@stevenedwardyoung]

@@Riley-uy5pe crazily enough, one of the most intense and interesting workloads for a Mac of any age is video editing, something someone who makes “dumb KZbin videos” already knows how to do. I’d much rather run a Final Cut benchmark of some sort than try to play Minecraft. But I’d settle for just seeing what settings any given Mac can run Halo on, at least that’s a game that we Mac users actually cared about back in the day (yes, I’m still bitter about losing bungie to Microsoft. No, I won’t get over it)

[@shadyweaver]

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?

[@hidden_vault]

Was going to suggest about those brackets

[@deltanet0]

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!

[@alfonsojon1997]

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!

[@minecraftcart328]

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

[@kaner5873]

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

[@nomadic_shadow]

These are really fun to watch, man.

[@owensvoboda]

just found this channel and instantly subbed, luv this stuff

[@ossydog]

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

[@macaius]

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!

[@exaltedb]

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

[@DanielLopez-up6os]

Love your Channel man! Early LGR vibes man!

[@ActionRetro]

Thank you!!

[@MichaelMonn]

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

[@Vlamat67]

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.

[@TheAMadMan]

Literally off the charts!

[@icanrunat3200mhz]

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.

[@aaroncook7709]

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.

[@snip3rm00n]

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

[@ScarlettStunningSpace]

Upgrades are always so satisfying

[@alerey4363]

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)

[@ActionRetro]

What distro do you like on PPC? I've been using Adelie - I'm thinking of trying that here.

[@alerey4363]

@@ActionRetro I used Debian PPC up to 2016, when basically all 32bit support ended; I chose Debian because of the super easy installation of literally thousands of apps, easy to manage and even when u need to compile something from source it's almost guaranteed to work in Debian and the immense user base and support; back in 2005 I used SuSE PowerPC which had an impressive MoL (Mac on Linux) app which allowed you to run MacOS from inside Linux natively (*NOT* emulated) in full speed, and SuSE documentation and presentation in 6 CDs was superb (when most Linux distros were "decent" at best in both departments); go ahead an make a couple of videos with the "software" side of bringing these vintage Macs up to date!

[@brendanhoffmann8402]

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!

[@BeefJerky4104]

I'm digging the channel amigo. That was a well earned sub. If I remember correctly, that 7800 GS was one of the fastest and last AGP card to be widely released. Definitely looking forward to see the outcome of that. I'm also super nostalgic for EVGA's "e-GeForce" branding.

[@elm.0]

Happy 21K subs! C:

[@MichaelAStanhope]

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!

[@ericbauer4559]

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.

[@Amicus-Goku-89]

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.

[@russelltennant5642]

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.

[@lmoore3rd]

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.

[@TheMetalMag]

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

[@StevenSmyth]

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!

[@juanstdio]

watching this video in my PB G4 15", nice vid!!

[@sirena7116]

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

[@Gadgetman1989]

He said how the upgrade board is a custom board made by someone, but I'm sure you could probably look up the parts

[@stevearkwright]

@@Gadgetman1989: Precisely. I was rather hoping he’d provide a link to the custom upgrade board maker as that’s something I need to pursue. In reality, it’s a haphazard quest, looking for the exact same creator. I admit that help with the search would be invaluable. My starting point is to ask on his Discord group if he’ll provide such a link. Whoever is is stands to do some quick trade (!).

[@prestigious0]

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.

[@richardbrobeck2384]

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 !

[@thiagob3773]

Super cool, I have a G4 MDD 2003 with the 7800GS (PC) "Bios Mod" version. There are 2 versions of the ROM, with and without temperature controller, the one without worked for me, because it was taking too long to start OSX. But works fine.

[@RetroTechToys]

I definitely need to check out your Minecraft server. Great video as always!

[@sixteenbitify]

Such a dream setup

[@MattTheComputerGeek]

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

[@VSigma725]

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

[@goclunker]

Exactly. Poorly researched

[@obineg5752]

how would you know what his machine was? the majority of sold models in the last year were the dual 1.25

[@goclunker]

@@obineg5752 wrong.

[@alphaLONE]

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

[@TheDukeOfZill]

Same, mine is the 400fw model with a single 1.25ghz processor. The experience in game should be the same though. Would a GPU would really help a lot here? There is a radeon hd 3850 agp card, only speculates that it can work, but no real world tests... it should let minecraft run very well.

[@WalnutSpice]

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

[@ClusterShart]

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

[@tedboggs4569]

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.

[@joshuamast5128]

You earn every like I always enjoy your video's keep up the good work

[@elektrokinesis4150]

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

[@joeturner7959]

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. )

[@AbeDillon]

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!

[@bluephreakr]

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!_*

[@MrLukealbanese]

Excellent!!

[@nicekeyboardalan6972]

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 :)

[@thekornreeper]

Got to love the weird beep :)

[@NotSoGoodGamer18]

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)

[@StuAff]

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

[@jvnelvlam00n]

i think he was talking about the quicksilver not the mdd

[@Amicus-Goku-89]

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

[@obineg5752]

it disables the 400 and uses the 800 as 400. that means you only have one bus under OS 9, which is a dealbreaker for some. :)

[@Amicus-Goku-89]

@@obineg5752 even if you get the FireWire 800 port to work it will only run at FireWire 400 speeds because Mac OS 9 never supported FireWire 800. But all Macs with G4 processors can run Mac OS 9 Lives which is a modified version of Mac OS 9 that disables the FireWire 800 port or runs it at FireWire 400 speeds and FireWire 800 is backwards compatible with FireWire 400.

[@benotsilent6703]

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

[@Jasontyo]

I love G4 and G5 era macs the most

[@DavideNastri]

Hi there! Thanks for the great videos and the fun... Do you know which kind of card I can put in my rev b bondi iMac to push it? I have a Voodoo2 and also I got a 333mhz g3 that I could overclock hopefully to 400 but... Can I do better? :D

[@portalsam_]

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.

[@Vlamat67]

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 ....

[@chainq68k]

Nice rig. I have a Quicksilver with a PowerLogiX dual 1.8Ghz G4 (7447A). These accelerators are fun.

[@TheHouseOfMoth]

nice build! My dual 2.0GHz MDD gets a geekbench score of 1472. It's an overclocked Sonnet card that lacks the L2 cache which makes a huge difference. The stock 1.42GHz MDD card, overclocked to 1.66GHz knocks that Sonnet card right on it's butt because it has the cache. 1.75GHz (liquid cooled) is even better! :D

[@ActionRetro]

Wonder if it's possible to clock this card faster...

[@TheHouseOfMoth]

@@ActionRetro you’ll find out soon! 😁

[@boristhespider8230]

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.

[@kbhasi]

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.

[@sadmac356]

Oh this is gonna be good!

[@supercrazymario404]

Amazingly I thought about making a CPU card just like the one you have using 2 7448s I could buy off aliexpress but I didn’t know how to make a converter pcb to connect the different pad layouts though seeing this already exist is AMAZING and honestly I would love to get one of these from the person who made this or maybe I’ll be able to make one myself if they have the pcb converter piece information that I could send to a custom pcb maker and then I could finally do this myself. As for the part with the SSDs, I could in theory setup drives in bootable RAID 0 if Mac OS 9 can boot from them but either way I’d use a PCI X card for a storage connection instead of the IDE on the main board. I heard some SATA cards are actually compatible with OS 9 at least with specific firmware though I haven’t looked deep into that. Though at least if Mac OS 9 didn’t support normal RAID 0 booting I could possibly use a card with a raid controller on the card and make the computer see all the drives as a single one.

[@antonpreacher2900]

great video ! What is the internet browser you're using ? I don't know this one :)

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

The dual CPU approach should have also been used on home PC builds on the AM3+ platform because the upgrade route could be huge, going from two fx4100 chips (for example) up to two fx8320 chips, especially if you have decent VRM cooling for possible overvolt clocking. Not only video editing but VMDQ and SR-IOV could use those cores and instructions sets with the right NIC (i350t4 RJ45 card etc.) for home NAS and gaming servers.

[@aa-au]

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.

[@AiOinc1]

Wow! Almost the same performance as my Latitude C640 in Minecraft when you set render distance to tiny. Not bad for a dual G4

[@Transit_Biker]

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

[@l11l1venom1l11l]

Great video. I've watched a lot of your newer vids, but just stumbled across this. My only question is why was the GPU never mentioned and what is the max that this machine would take? 128MB Radeon 9200?

[@sugargliderdude]

those hands moving around all the time LOL

[@baconfister]

I simply need to break out my “world’s fastest AGP” dual 2.0GHz machine and do a video on it. Started toying around with it in 2016 or 2017. SSD of course, and somehow OSX acknowledges the installed 2GB of RAM 🤷🏼‍♂️ (not supposed to to that from what I have read) but it boots into OS9 and runs everything way faster than one can imagine. I don’t recall if it’s got a GeForce 4MX or whatevertheheck graphics card is in it. Anyway, EVERYONE hit me up if there is interest in playing original Unreal/Unreal Tournament or Deus Ex online multiplayer on OS9 - I really miss those old school days of lore.

[@the_holy_forestfairy]

He's doing it again... Mac-Xtreme-Moding FTW !! 😂😂😂

[@pintobeans994]

the king of hand gestures

[@CoyoteSeven]

I think I've seen other vids on KZbin where they got a GeForce 7800GS working on a Mac. Would be interesting to see how much that improves the performance of your machine here!

[@nosville22]

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

[@KevinJohnson-fw8kv]

where did you get the upgrade board with the 7448 CPUs?

[@NonsensicalSpudz]

15:06 If I'm not mistaken they eventually added an option to toggle between the docks on like mountain lion or something

[@gregzambo6693]

I had one of those. Great Mac for its time, but it was the loudest Mac I ever used too.

[@5thaltaccount547]

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.