Overclocking the Fastest iMac G3

[@1eyedwilli3]

I overlocked and water cooled a g4 733mhz iMac with a solid piece of copper. 1.44ghz

[@charliesretrocomputing]

wow thats cool!

[@minty_Joe]

How long did it survive the OC?

[@1eyedwilli3]

@@minty_Joe I stopped messing with it back in 2010-2011. I would say it lasted 3 years. I used to play old Mac games and Diablo 2.

[@RubberDucku_MC]

Maximum performance engaged.

[@apolloeosphoros4345]

big ppc energy

[@Lilithe]

I did this mod on my ex's iMac with a dollar store soldering iron and it worked great. It was 400MHz and I made it 450MHz and helped her install OSX.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

taking it apart is easy cause I never put it back together from last time I took it apart I love it🤣🤣🤣

[@kumarp3074]

Fancy tools are nice but often times the tools you already have can get the job done.

[@linglingstar]

I remember having a 350mhz iMac G3 back in the day when I was a kid. I installed Tiger on it. Did you need the overclock for install or just for better performance?

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

_Dollar Store soldering iron!?_

[@iiidiy]

As a connoisseur of tiny, fragile components and the ever-present threat of irreversible damage... I was already subscribed :)

[@BilisNegra]

Hey sir, the notification for your latest video in my feed is almost right next to the one for this video! Guess I'll watch it right after this.

[@iiidiy]

@@BilisNegra Well... we have very different styles (I'm a quiet introvert), but we are united in our love of quirky retro hardware, and I love what Sean does! Hope you enjoy :)

[@BilisNegra]

2:18 So, that array of resistors and different pads they can be soldered to is something like a dip switch but 1000 times as hard to operate!

[@TheDemocrab]

What about replacing the CPU fan entirely with an early-AGP era graphics card fan? They were small and narrow so they might fit into the available space, plus the Noctua fans on the back would probably do wonders for thermals. If mounting it isn't straightforward then in my experience going full jank with zip ties works provided you remember to check them for wear every so often and really make sure whatever you make is pushing the heatsink onto the CPU, rather than just holding it above it.

[@bbbbank8578]

Noctua is only for low sound works the same as any other fan I'm pretty well sure. I always just add a dial switch mod to my fans if I can't use a app or adjust in settings like for a console gaming system for example.

[@K3NnY_G]

11:42 - RIP another plastic tab.

[@_..-.._..-.._]

😂 nice catch

[@jimcabezola3051]

Back in 2005, I had a firm replace the G3 in my iMac DV with a G4. It ran beautifully...for a couple of weeks. I was not as smart as most people. They would've used a fan such as what you have. Maybe my G4 would've lasted longer. Mahalo for this video; it brings back memories of removing and replacing that logic board.

[@dominicskywalker]

There is a fan header located under the cmos battery. But you’ll have to solder the connections

[@letsgooutdoorsusa]

You know since they kind of work like switches, it would be kind of neat for you to add some dip switches, this way you change the speeds on the fly. Just a thought

[@ocsanik502]

You could probably actually even hook them up to a microcontroller and change the clockspeed from command line

[@nticompass]

I was just going to comment that I wonder if you could somehow solder on DIP switches to make changing this easier.

[@ricardojpinheiro]

One zero zero one zero zero one, SOS... The Body Electric, from Rush. It's all I could remember.

[@sinisterpisces]

"Bubbles" goggles. I understood that reference. :) Awesome video. Is there a way to install adjustable jumpers or something similar so you can adjust the resistors without having to (de)solder them every time?

[@rayproductionsbackupchanne3862]

i got a titanium powerbook g4 here. it's upgraded from 1 ghz to 1.27 ghz. this thing SCREAMS.. i got some custom cooling. added a 3rd fan+heatsink from a old 2010 macbook pro. this thing is so quick now. also added modern wifi internally. so it actually browses the web.

[@TradieTrev]

You're no dosdude1 bro lol, I don't understand why Rinoa never got interested into linux like we have. Give her some encouragement!

[@RetroAnachronist]

I did this back in the day. Circa 2000 or so. Bought me a base model 350MHz, overclocked it to 400. Also tried soldering on a VGA connector, as mine wasn’t a DV. Sadly that didn’t work. Probably needed some other components.

[@Megabean]

Weird fact. every time I see a Star Tech Fan. That place is from my home city. They aren't even a random chinese brand, they are from London Ontario. I inturned there like 15 years ago. I have no idea why or how they exist tbh. They create the most random stuff you can imagine

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

I wish I had one of those later iMacs. I had an original tray-drive version and LOVED it until it died. It was a great little machine.

[@panopolis8051]

if you havent already, replacing the electrolytic capacitors would most likely help with stability, maybe even reaching higher overclock. But I'm sure you already knew that :P

[@Kyle-xv5kv]

Finally an up to date video on how to do this, I now have the confidence to attempt to take my snow G3 to 700mhz!

[@JimmyDoresHairDye]

I'd try and get an exhaust fan that dumps directly outside of the case. Even stock these chips ran a bit hot. I'd be careful running at 800 MHz.

[@charlesjmouse]

Always fun... FWVLIW: I suspect those 'resistors' are Zero Ohm, in which case you may find the pad spacing will take a SMD DIP switch package for easier fiddling. Also if you dare, you may find a really thin Peltier and some thermal goo will fit where the thermal pad on the CPU was situated - enough juice, fan(s), fingers crossed you don't thermally saturate the whole thing, and your CPU temp issues will be behind you... ...then assuming the RAM (most likely) isn't the primary bottleneck you may even get a few more MHz out of it.

[@bene5431]

102 means 10 with 2 additional zeros, so 1000 Ohm and 103 is 10 with 3 zeros, so 10kOhm. But maybe they could be replaced with dipswitches, idk

[@blubaustin1]

Also for my imac g3 I installed a 120mm fan under the handle. Used a dremel then installed it. Worked really well.

[@quittessa1409]

Maybe see if you can up the Bus Clock from 100 to 133, that would net you a big boost to the Ram speed and general system, also see if you can get better cooling on the cpu itself and you could probably bump the voltage a little more or just be more stable thermally That laptop G3 900 would be a Lot better tho, as it's binned for a laptop it should be a LOT lower power envelope so should be able to clock like a Boss with desktop cooling and power available to it

[@goclunker]

Bus speeds aren’t changeable on these I don’t believe.

[@glossymouse7712]

Was there even a difference between the old PowerPC laptop and desktop CPUs?

[@goclunker]

@@glossymouse7712 yes.

[@alexandrecouture2462]

Great! I overclocked my iMac g3 400DV to 450mhz and my Mac Mini G4 1.25ghz to 1.5ghz.

[@TheSulross]

always pushing the envelope of retro computing technology advancement

[@joltdude]

Wonder if you could replace that resistor bank with a dip switch

[@crtchicanery9605]

Love the video! Highly unrelated question: how difficult would it be to give an iMac G3 monitor an input for another video source? My iMac's tube outclasses every other CRT monitor I own by a huge margin, so it feels like a shame I can't use it for more devices!

[@iiidiy]

I looked into this a few months ago, and it seemed rather difficult. Involved a couple of Arduinos and programming... if that's your kinda thing

[@iiidiy]

"Rocky Hill" is the channel I found figuring it out, not sure if I can post a direct video link here

[@crtchicanery9605]

@@iiidiySounds pretty intense. I'll check it out though, ty!

[@eDoc2020]

Which model are you talking about? I didn't think any iMac ever had a Trinitron. I know the Color Classic did and maybe some AIO Power Macs.

[@crtchicanery9605]

​@@eDoc2020 I think I'm just wrong. Looks like I took the knowledge that Apple fought hard to use Trinitrons at some point and just assumed they kept using them after that. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'll remove the reference to Trinitron in my original comment. Thanks for the correction!

[@T.Ross.]

“...but more on that in a bit” - I love the delivery of that line. 🤓

[@peporgan]

Nice video! Did you hear that there were aftermarket CPU upgrades for the slot-load iMacs? I heard the G3s went up to 1.1GHz and there may have also been a few G4 boards. You had to ship the whole motherboard to a technician to do the upgrade, since soldering was involved.

[@GAMECLOSET]

I enjoy watching you doing these experiments so much. I just obtained 2 G4 iMacs and I’m doing some small upgrades. I don’t go anywhere near as far as you go, but it’s so fun to get these classic machines running well with maxed specs and modern SSDs.

[@porovaara]

powerpc performance is very linear for clock speed increases much like 0x0 (030 etc...) archs.

[@Cmdrbzrd]

68k?

[@blubaustin1]

I overclocked a emac g4. It was a matter of breaking off some bridge resistors.

[@kylekirby6424]

100% do the Frankenstein's Monster and harvest a G3 from an iBook!!

[@zaxchannel2834]

Awesome. When I had a 600MHz I really wanted to figure out a way to get it to a G4... I was bummed that this was only an upgrade for older tray loading models

[@HrutkayMods]

I fell off my couch at the 550MHz XD

[@DanaDoesStuff]

I was just thinking while watching this, “I wonder if he could pull a 900 MHz G3 from an iBook?“ Sounds like Collin had the same idea. That would be fun to see!

[@WilliamHaisch]

13:13 I remember that movie: Underworld: Mac Attack! Singe: We’ve been trying to combine the product lines. It was useless. Even at the retail level, our SKU’s seemed destined to destroy each other. But if we were able to get our hands on the right CPU and inject it into this iMac… Viktor: _Abomination._ Singe: *Half G3… Half G4… but stronger than both!*

[@Epicgamer_Mac]

1:48 you deserve a shoutout from LTT

[@ncc74656m]

Copper heatsink plus one or even two of these shockingly small fans we're seeing these days would probably help. I think the smallest I recall seeing is a 14mm fan? I forget now though.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

he should have soldered dip switches in for overclocking, so he does not have to keep soldering it over and over again to get the speed he wants but he has to do it the hard way

[@ncc74656m]

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue I thought about that and then just forgot, haha. But yes, absolutely.

[@derpsakry4464]

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Then it would be interesting to see what happens if he changed the setting while the computer is on.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

@@derpsakry4464 well dipswitches would make doing that a whole lot easier

[@RinoaL]

I'm definitely going to message you with the ideas I have in mind to take this to 1ghz with my machine haha

[@ActionRetro]

woohoo!!

[@clemklem]

Great video, i'd love to see more of this overclocked G3, especially running games, web browsing with it, using demanding apps such as photoshop... To kind of push it in its limits

[@bryans8656]

Your posts are part of my Saturday morning coffee routine 🙂

[@dobtuwu]

I'm new to this channel and you have kept me hooked, keep up the work man you're gonna hit 100k maybe even a million👀

[@decimat777]

There's a few videos out there with a G4 series mac that had a cpu swap with a newer faster/efficient cpu (usually almost double clockrate at the same tdp) but I don't think I've ever seen if a G3 had this capability.

[@andresbravo2003]

Hell yeah man! This would make it better. I played ClassiCube on my Windows XP Machine and seemed playable and quite smooth!

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

soldering hot tweezers sounds like a lot of fun🤣🤣🤣

[@TheRealDavidLawrence]

Would you be so inclined to 3D print spacers to rebuild this in a box chassis?

[@jesicae5975]

deathly curious, would a Pelletier cooler be viable on here? If they were good enough for Apple to ship on the higher clocked 8100s...

[@darsparx]

I just want the soldering tweezers. Only thing that could convince me to try harder soldering projects right now 😂😅

[@rickkarrer8370]

I'd love to see a comparison of a 1GHz G3 and whatever you can get out of a G4 in it.

[@phlogios]

I have the same iMac 700mhz, it died from overheating without overclocking and I had to swap the logic board, so this video made me sweat a little

[@goclunker]

What I really wanna see is a ati radeon 7500 in there. Pipe dream I am sure, as the rage and radeon are very different

[@DL4RCE]

Thanks

[@TruckCentral]

I’m just here for the Trailer Park Boys reference. I approve. 👍

[@noemedmedia]

Thumbnail game on point

[@auteurfiddler8706]

I would love to see you change to a faster G3. Since it is not socketed, it would be quite and accomplishment. I tried to find a G4 that was the type that was pin compatible (for a beige G3, not an IMAC G3) with a G3 but there seemed be none for sale for anything affordable and only two or three for sale in the whole world. I wonder if the G4's from Tower case G4 DA can be desoldered and somehow made to work in an IMAC.

[@bf0189]

Two Mac overclocking videos today? Heck yeah!

[@ptiyoshi6796]

I want to see a apple m1 2 3 pro max I d'ont know inside a imac g3 CRT.

[@wskinnyodden]

Yooo, I have me an iBook G4 running MorphOS! Yes I bought it. Wanna make a video on it?

[@samuell.foxton4177]

I have a Sawtooth G4 tower that I want to put MorphOS on. It has a 1.7GHz Sonnet upgrade, but is still on the stock ATI Rage GPU

[@stephanemignot100]

I'm lazy, I bought a 2004 eMac G4 1.25ghz, a DOSBox machine mostly ^

[@48aee]

My emac is gonna murder me also nice to see rinoa finally get some clout after all these years

[@Skyspace187]

I would have soldered on a DIP switch... I hate hot tweezers.

[@rager1969]

Cool, you got 54 more. I wonder if the limit you hit was a power thing, since I would've expected to at least bong and crash after a little bit.

[@myjunkinyourtrunk1872]

Water cooling!!

[@amdintelxsniperx]

heat wont be an issue because you are not messing with voltage . if you increase the voltage im 90 percent sure it would wall at 900 no more . the reason is 900 mhz cpus are a thing .

[@RetroTechorDie]

Excellent video! So easy even I could do it!!

[@codecthelios]

Wow my grade school teacher could really grade my class at lightning speed with one overclocked like this.

[@grimmpickins2559]

The end 'discussion' makes me really curious about the last eMac 1.42... Could it? Would it? I mean... if a g3 can become a g4, can a g4 become a g5? (My gods, would that be my ultimate Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 machine - built in CRT, a processor that can actually take my mods...I really upset my G4 MDD with it the last time we played together, I'm hoping my taped pins on the GPU just came loose...)

[@danielrhodes7594]

so would that G3 900 from the ibook be able to be put into a Powermac G3 Tower? That sounds like something fun to try.

[@conjie1986]

id try it on mine but the power board needs replacing as CRT wont start

[@VK2FVAX]

Can you run it at higher speeds with 133SPEC ram instead of 100mhz? What about over-voltage?

[@adamreams715]

do you have a location on where i can get two slot loading dvd drives i have a flower edtion and a blue one i would like to get them replaced in and working

[@oscodains]

Was swapping the resistors around really the only difference between the different models of the G3?

[@drewfranklinaustin]

Couldn't you possibly use a rpi pico to pump out your desired binary to adjust the overclock without so much trouble

[@yukkuriwa]

It would be fun trying to get Gentoo Linux on that thing, with a no-multilib lto hardened musl llvm clang profile, and set as less use flags as possible, and apply -O3 when possible, also use zram for the swap and use a lightweight window manager like openbox or icewm, it would be fun!

[@TheMetalMag]

I like you videos, you're gifted and it's cool to see. Overcloaking has been done back then in 99 when I was using my beloved graphiste IMACDVSE that died to to much use and heat I guess... I'd like to know what those overcloeked computer became and how long did they last. I wouldn't do that those days.

[@jacobmckenna8661]

That soldering iron looks like some sort of Halo weapon

[@HyenaEmpyema]

good job filming the soldering, thats not easy

[@charliesretrocomputing]

I love how I can get 1000 fps in ClassiCube on a 2017 dell optiplex. I HAVE to try on my RX 6700 XT gaming PC 🤣

[@jabrow7135]

Adrian's Digital Basement is doing a similar video today.

[@ActionRetro]

I know, total awesome coincidence! It's old Mac overclock day

[@wskinnyodden]

You realize the first CPU that ran at 1Ghz was the AMD K7@750Mhz, the thing is it did it with a Kryotech case, so basically a no-frost freezer connected to the top of the CPU.

[@another3997]

Firstly that was a very different CPU architecture, and secondly, he tried running it at 900MHz, not 1GHz. The G3 Mac's case and layout is far from optimal regarding heat dissipation, worse than most standard desktop or tower cases, and was never designed to use a CPU fan. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the near 30% overclock failed. So not quite an Apple to Apples comparison. Pun intended. 😁

[@brianbidner5701]

can you ajust the ram speed and hard drive and usb speed ass well and firewire

[@EirikrTinkerTries]

OMFG DID YOU FIND THE IBOOK G3 CPU?! Can…can you solder swap the iBooks better GPU as well? Or is that impossible?

[@WilliamHaisch]

If this had been known about back when I still worked at a school there would have been so many work orders to mod labs full of G3 iMacs… the horror… the horror… 😂

[@CebolaBros]

Classicube ftw!

[@somberrhombus]

Lol, i used the same USB fans to cool my M1 Macbook Air when gaming.

[@MSmith-Photography]

The fan on top is just a hat for your iMac. 🤣

[@NexXxus86]

err. I don't think this makes any difference. you blocked the fans intake with the cdrom.. I'd mount the fan somewhere else where it actually has intake or outtake.

[@TheBenSanders]

Your channel is underrated and always gives Krazy Ken vibes lmao

[@SockyNoob]

Bro replace that PRAM battery with a lithium cell. They make lithium versions of that type of battery.

[@ryanfowlow8034]

"Special Bubbles Glasses" 🤣

[@retropuffer2986]

You overclocked it so fast you could slingshot around the sun and travel back in time....

[@twooey8232]

I wonder how playable Minecraft is on my eMac. I need to dig it out and mess with it some more.

[@TheRus13]

Надо поставить радиатор и вентилятор от процессора пентиум 1 и будет отлично охлаждать.

[@lvl90dru1d]

радиатор от оки туда надо (ох вейт где он в штатах оку найдет)

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Fun fact, advice on Russian on an English-language video isn't going to be terribly helpful.

[@plushifoxed]

@@halfsourlizard9319youtube lets you translate comments at the push of a button (at least on mobile), it's not that serious

[@lvl90dru1d]

@@halfsourlizard9319 that's true

[@T.Ross.]

@@halfsourlizard9319Even funnier fact: there’s “Translate to English” underneath each post, which _is_ helpful. 😉

[@dukeseb]

I honestly thought I would fall out of the chair is it went down to 350..😂

[@NikiDaDude]

Oooh I did this back in the day but only dared to go from 350 to 400Mhz

[@Antony-w3l]

I love your posts... Keep them comming... :-)...

[@ambrosealpha870]

Water cooling?

[@MarcosCodas]

I somehow never knew soldering tweezers existed

[@eventualpine]

If the g3 were compatible with x tiger, Zachary staines wouldn't exist.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

My eMac be like: "Lol, capacitor plague. Also, no linux for you." It's overclocked too. It's a meracle it didn't crash under MacOS.

[@BarackOBonzo]

What!!!???!?!?!?!?!?! Over 900!!!!! well, that is actually impossible...