Bought a couple cheap Netac SSD's (like $11 each) to put in the Mac Pro, but decided to see if the G5's would recognize them. They do! Guess i'll be buying some more. Lol.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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@wicknix Thanks for the heads up! I've just checked eBay UK and the British prices are a tad higher but still bargain basement cheap. If I need SSDs then I know which brand I'll be looking for. 
I've been using 2 of them for the last year in the mac pro w/out issue. Initially i just wanted to fill the remaining 2 slots with ssd's for other operating systems (currently boots 10.13.6 and MX Linux on the ssd's, and 10.6/10.7 on a HD) but yeah, for the price i can't complain.
Cheers
Cheers
Oh if we're going that route let me fire up my PlayStation 3.
No, I did a full disassembly on the Twelve to finally replace the DC-in board that I was told was faulty (and why the battery wouldn't work), only for it to not solve the problem. Replacing the battery or the DC-DC board did nothing as well. My suspicions now lie with the logic board and at this point I might as well just cut my losses, put 'er back together, and just live with not having portable power.
Maybe I'll get a ChugPlug or similar for it.
No, I did a full disassembly on the Twelve to finally replace the DC-in board that I was told was faulty (and why the battery wouldn't work), only for it to not solve the problem. Replacing the battery or the DC-DC board did nothing as well. My suspicions now lie with the logic board and at this point I might as well just cut my losses, put 'er back together, and just live with not having portable power.
Maybe I'll get a ChugPlug or similar for it.
G5 has received a host of upgrades
- 10.5 installed and updates
- 8GB of RAM installed
- Final cut Express 4 installed
- Installed Aperture 2 on a different drive
- Building environment on system to do some light Xcode work on some really old projects I started years ago.
Details Please!!??
I am happy I found I had more as I want to install a 2nd in my 3,1 and 5,1 each. Love these aluminum tanks!
I put in 4 different SSD drives and my G5 wouldn't see them. I really would like to move my primary boot over to an SSD!
Just got a G4 tower I've been keeping an eye out for for some time now...
A mid-2003 PowerMac G4 Mirror Drive Door, with the 1.25 GHz single processor, Combo Drive and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 64 MB of VRAM. It came with the original stock 256 MB of RAM and the 80 GB hard drive, but I already ordered a 2 GB RAM upgrade.
The back.
It powered on the first time I tried it and chimed and all, but I didn't hook it up to an external display due to not having a compatible cable or display at the moment. Then I powered it down, and then later when I tried to use it with my 20" Cinema Display, when I'd power it on the power light would be on for a couple of seconds and it'd black out as the fan would run for a couple of seconds before stopping, and it wouldn't go any further. I did a Google search and it appears a dead PRAM battery is to blame; I already ordered a replacement battery.
A mid-2003 PowerMac G4 Mirror Drive Door, with the 1.25 GHz single processor, Combo Drive and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro with 64 MB of VRAM. It came with the original stock 256 MB of RAM and the 80 GB hard drive, but I already ordered a 2 GB RAM upgrade.
The back.
It powered on the first time I tried it and chimed and all, but I didn't hook it up to an external display due to not having a compatible cable or display at the moment. Then I powered it down, and then later when I tried to use it with my 20" Cinema Display, when I'd power it on the power light would be on for a couple of seconds and it'd black out as the fan would run for a couple of seconds before stopping, and it wouldn't go any further. I did a Google search and it appears a dead PRAM battery is to blame; I already ordered a replacement battery.
I ended up buying a pack of those batteries because I've picked up so many machines with exhausted ones.
Congrats on your new addition.
Anyone knowing Boost and magic code? Need to fix libcontext so that tests pass.
On a positive side, we have almost finished i2pd: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/16749 (PPC build fixed with upstream!)
On a positive side, we have almost finished i2pd: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/16749 (PPC build fixed with upstream!)
Brought the PowerBook inside for a little while. It's still going to be in the garage, but I haven't used it for months due to the summer. Came right back up.
LOL. No.Abbott and Costello in your wallpaper?
Cast of the Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason (far left), Art Carney (left), Audrey Meadows (center) and Joyce Randolph (right).
Ah thanks. Gleason looked like Costello - to my deranged eyes for some reason.
Never saw the Honeymooners but I've heard of it courtesy of the Back to the Future reference involving "The Man from Space" episode.
I was always taught to respect women and that you never, ever, hit them. I bring that up because it was this training that caused me to avoid watching the show. Gleason's Ralph Kramden was a loudmouth (which I do not like) always threatening to 'send Alice to the moon' while raising a fist at her.Ah thanks. Gleason looked like Costello - to my deranged eyes for some reason.
Never saw the Honeymooners but I've heard of it courtesy of the Back to the Future reference involving "The Man from Space" episode.
It wasn't until much later (like around 2016 or so) that I watched the show and realized I had it all wrong. Yes, Ralph does that, but he never follows through and Alice gives back as good as she gets from Ralph. She stands up to him and it's always that part I missed.
That made a hero out of Audrey Meadows to me and I've been a fan of hers ever since. Audrey Meadows herself was a very strong woman. She is the ONLY cast member of that show to have contracted for and received residuals.
This particular desktop used to be a bit more involved (you can see it in the wallpaper thread), but eventually some of the Yahoo Widgets died. The moonphase is the only one that seems to still work. The rest of that stuff is Geektool and Simple Floating Clock.
Audrey Meadows has been on my primary desktops in some form or another since and this particular desktop hasn't changed in years - a testament to how much I like it because I change wallpaper like people change clothes.
TenFourFox still viable. I'm definitely not using this Mac to browse anymore though.
Oh…I should mention that the Mac is backing up at the moment. CCCs scheduled tasks picked up once the Mac got back on the network.
Oh…I should mention that the Mac is backing up at the moment. CCCs scheduled tasks picked up once the Mac got back on the network.
Hmmm, maybe I'll do that as well. But for the time being, I removed the depleted PRAM battery, and I can get it to boot, but half the time I do need to unplug the Mac and then plug it back in for it to start up again. I did this so I could wipe the internal hard drive...I ended up buying a pack of those batteries because I've picked up so many machines with exhausted ones.
Congrats on your new addition.
Yeah I know, my space is really cluttered, but I guess it's a trait I inherited from my dad. Plus, I'm contemplating getting a 17" LCD Apple Studio Display, or maybe the older 20" Apple Cinema Display with ADC connector, since the PowerMac does have such a port and it'd be a few less wires to deal with!
Not as cluttered as mine, I can assure you of that!
I'm fortunate that I'm single and live alone because otherwise there would be major fights with a significant other about my lifestyle choices. As I type this reply to you in my main room, I'm surrounded by hundreds of books, endless DVDs, scores of journals, magazines and a wide variety of tech plus some analogue video content (VHS/Laserdisc) that I really ought to stop procrastinating about and digitise.
When a friend visited me they exclaimed: "Your home is exactly as I imagined it. Books everywhere!" 😂
Do you think you'll upgrade the HDD or add a 2nd one?
I will probably add a second one.Not as cluttered as mine, I can assure you of that!
I'm fortunate that I'm single and live alone because otherwise there would be major fights with a significant other about my lifestyle choices. As I type this reply to you in my main room, I'm surrounded by hundreds of books, endless DVDs, scores of journals, magazines and a wide variety of tech plus some analogue video content (VHS/Laserdisc) that I really ought to stop procrastinating about and digitise.
When a friend visited me they exclaimed: "Your home is exactly as I imagined it. Books everywhere!" 😂
Do you think you'll upgrade the HDD or add a 2nd one?
After wrapping up a way recently (over on the Early Intel Macs forum) to improve the heat dissipation dynamics of an aluminium (2006–2008) MacBook Pro using thermal pads to aid with passive cooling, I decided to crack open one of my two DLSD PowerBook G4s to see whether I could do anything similar for them.
Before sharing anything more, I ought to forewarn how the data for the PowerBook are limited, and results are still indeterminate.
Part of this was 1) my fault; part of it is 2) the inherent quirks of the temperature sensors in the PowerBook (namely, how the GPU readings are useless on, at least, the A1138 and A1139); and part of this is 3) an inherent design limitation of presenting data over time with the older version of iStat Menus — namely, the pre-Intel Snow Leopard versions are not designed to show temperature graphs in “Last Hour”, ”Last 24 Hours”, and “Last 7 Days”.
For my PowerBook G4s, I use some iteration of G4FanControl — in Leopard, the GUI version, and in SL-PPC, the command-line version. At start-up, I have all three sensors set to 48°C — meaning, the fans kick on when the sensors rise above that threshold. Of course, with the GPU readings never being correct, I’m not altogether sure from where all three of those GPU sensor readings originate. There’s “CPU bottom”, “CPU/Intrepid Bottom”, and the inaccurate “GPU” sensor. That said, when the first two sensors are below 48°C, even if the GPU sensor reports 100°C, both fans stay off, so who even knows.
For the PowerBook G4 on which I did this mod, the A1138, I’m accustomed to seeing the right fan kick on first and, in the past, at a slightly higher overall speed than the left fan. It’s not unusual for the right fan to be just above 2000rpm while the left fan is in the mid-to-high 1000s. The A1138’s fans max out in the low-to-mid 3000rpm range (the A1139s use a different fan design and manufacturer, and those can top out at over 6000rpm).
The approach I followed with the PowerBook differs from the MBP linked above.
The MBP’s heat sink assembly is two pipes which are mounted about 1mm above the bottom case, and in factory configuration, makes the fans do most, if not nearly all of the thermal dissipation work. The A1138, meanwhile, has a different heat sink assembly. For one, it lives about 5.5mm above the bottom case, kept there by bottom case stand-offs. The does allow some air to circulate beneath the heat sink assembly in ways which the 17-inch MBP cannot, so there is some passive cooling to be eked from that design decision alone.
Also, there is a metal plate integrated into the PowerBook’s heat sink assembly’s design. That plate is peppered with holes of about 6–10mm. These holes increase the surface area of the heat sink assembly’s edges through which air can move and make contact with the holes’ edges, also helping with passive cooling (one can also see several of these 5.5mm stand-offs in this view of the assembly, shown upside-down from how it’s configured when reassembled):
A thermal pad mod here, if one is to be tried, requires a different approach.
For the MBP, the objective was to make it less hot to use on a lap (by de-localizing where passive thermal dissipation ended up under the bottom case). For the PowerBook, the objective I’m after is to keep the CPU/GPU/Intrepid as cool as possible; to mitigate the need for fan-based active cooling; and to keep the fans spinning at lower RPM and, thus, quiet(er) (which could be a higher priority for PowerBooks with only one fan and their tendency to make a lot of noise whilst hot, such as on 12-inch and Titanium models).
Expectations for the outcome here are going to be different than with that MBP — namely, does anything actually improve with this thermal pad modification?
What I chose to do was to focus on the solid metal anchors, the areas resembling grey plates, directly under/opposite the three heatsink areas — seen above as those grey areas covering up the copper heat pipe. As the bottom case stands measure about 5.5mm and the grey plates are about 2mm high, I went with a plan to apply 3.5–4.0mm “stacks” of the same silicone thermal pad material I used with the MBP mod.
Unlike the MBP, I wanted these thermal pad “stacks” to assist the grey plate areas directly beneath the heat-generating chips by bridging them directly to the bottom case and shunting some of the passive cooling directly to the bottom case itself (i.e., by making direct contact with the bottom case), whilst leaving be the rest of the grey metal plate (with the holes) as they continue with the same, as-designed, air-based passive cooling:
Were one to flip over the assembly, as one can see on the iFixit guides (below), there are two copper plates — one each for the GPU and the CPU — and a centre area which, in OEM form, includes a foam-based thermal pad for the Agere Intrepid IC (which, if I understand correctly, is a combination northbridge/memory controller):
Unlike the CPU and GPU, the Agere Intrepid IC in the middle is basically a big square of black plastic.
[On my PowerBook, the big, off-white square foam thermal pad you see above did not cover up another copper square but, rather, the same exposed heat pipe and metal plate with those holes. In my PowerBooks, that OEM pad disintegrated a long time ago, and I removed its oily, degraded self in 2020.]
During my last clean-out two years ago, I applied a line of thermal paste along the Agere Intrepid plastic cover to run parallel with the copper beneath. For this mod, I cut a 1mm-thick strip of silicone-based thermal pad to replace the paste from 2020, but only as a strip aligned with and as wide as the copper, not as a square (as I didn’t note a change in temperature from the “CPU/Intrepid” sensor after making that prior change with paste — i.e., it never gets as hot as the CPU, even when under high load).
As with before, direct contact between copper plates and both GPU/CPU was handled with Noctua NT-H2 thermal paste. The stuff just works.
Before reassembling, this is how the “stack” modification appeared prior to flipping over the heat sink assembly:
(I also took the time to clean the not-very-dirty fan blades and to add fresh lubrication to the spindles, much as I did about a year ago.)
SO HOW DID IT GO?
The short answer: the modification didn’t hurt the PowerBook at all. Did it help with cooling? Hard to say just yet.
The two differences I’m able to suss from before/after, given how I’m unable to access temp and fan data points over time:
1) The three areas (well, more like the two areas of the CPU and Intrepid) on the bottom case, directly underneath the stacks, are a bit warmer than I remember them being before. This suggests that the stacks are working as intended.
2) The fans still run at or above 48°C, whilst idling, due to my G4FanControl settings. I am noting their velocities now run in the 1200–1300rpm range, whereas before it was common before to see at least one of them flirt with 2000rpm from time to time and stick comfortably in the 1500–1800rpm range. This could also be due to a fresh round of lubrication on the spindles.
CONCLUSION
What I should have done for this before/after test: set G4FanControl to a high threshold (but not so high as to damage the chips; anything up to 70°C should be fine for this setting). Then, push the PowerBook (i.e., run a video for 5 minutes, followed by halting the video) and find where the CPU and Intrepid find their equilibrium temperatures with passive-cooling only. As I only did the “after”, playing back a 360p YT clip and opening the iSight FW camera, I could push the PowerBook to 68°C CPU and 57°C Intrepid without fans; the localized underside locations were hot to the touch.
After the mod, I’ve noted how after following these steps and letting passive cooling, including with my “stack” mod, handle all the heat management, the CPU returns to an idle temp at around 49–50°C, and the Intrepid hovers around 47–48°C. This is whilst Interweb-PPC, Terminal, and Finder are also running on SL-PPC, but with nothing else drawing from processing resources.
This is, frankly, marginally warmer than with my usual G4FanControl settings of 48°C, but not far from what my C2D MBP runs when it’s idling (i.e., 50–54°C, though its fans always run by design). With G4FanControl set to 48°C, CPU and Intrepid hum along at around 45°C as the fans run between 1190 and 1260rpm. [UPDATE after about 30 minutes of idling at the G4FanControl 48°C setting: CPU is at 45°C, Intrepid is at 44°C and both fans have shut off entirely. The ambient room temperature is just a smidge over 23°C.]
I hesitate to make a definitive declaration, but provisionally, this modification seems to aid slightly with passive cooling. By how much? I don’t yet know.
Is it worth it to you to try? I also don’t know, but it isn’t liable to impede on the as-designed passive cooling at all and, if anything, might aid things somewhat. If you already have sheets of silicone thermal pad handy, then it can’t hurt to give it a try. The thermal pad sheets (the ones I ordered were 10x10cm) are pretty cheap, and they’re offered in different thicknesses.
tl;dr: I’ll be making this same modification with my A1139 on a forthcoming weekend, and I’ll do better diligence with chronicling and recording before-and-after temperatures. But hopefully this should give y’all a starting sense of whether having heat move directly to the bottom case, via a trio of solid, thermal pad stacks/columns located directly beneath each heat generator, helps with overall cooling efficiency.
Before sharing anything more, I ought to forewarn how the data for the PowerBook are limited, and results are still indeterminate.
Part of this was 1) my fault; part of it is 2) the inherent quirks of the temperature sensors in the PowerBook (namely, how the GPU readings are useless on, at least, the A1138 and A1139); and part of this is 3) an inherent design limitation of presenting data over time with the older version of iStat Menus — namely, the pre-Intel Snow Leopard versions are not designed to show temperature graphs in “Last Hour”, ”Last 24 Hours”, and “Last 7 Days”.
In reverse order:
3) iStat Menus version 4.00 and on through 4.22 are Intel-only and, as far as I recall, run only on Intel Snow Leopard and up. Version 4.22 is what I used on the linked post above for the C2D MBP from 2008. Version 4.x and higher brought in the active line charts for temperatures and other sensors. Here’s an example of version 4.22 from that MBP:
For PowerPC Macs, the ceiling for iStat Menus is version 3.19 (which works all the way up to 10.5.8 and the PowerPC-bootable 10.6 developer builds). Version 3.x lacks these and only displays current temperatures at any given moment:
2) I don’t know whether this is a quirk limited to just the Mobility Radeon 9700 GPUs installed in all of the 1.67MHz PowerBooks (both DLSD and SLSD) or something more broadly to Radeon 9xxx-series GPUs in Mac laptops, but the GPU sensor temperature on both my A1138 and A1139 G4s are notorious for showing a GPU sensor temperature of 100°C when the system is completely idle and, when a GPU-related load is applied, the GPU temperature actually drops from 100°C (in the above cap, 91°C showed up shortly after the idle 100, because I was actually using the system). Note: this sensor, on either of my PowerBooks, has never shown higher than 100°C, ever. But I can verify that the 100°C reading at idle is woefully incorrect. High heat would be borne out by hot-to-the-touch case temperatures, and this isn’t the case, ever, with the inaccurately high readings. I have no earthly idea why these PowerBooks do this. I chalk it up to ATI’s temperature sensor in the GPU die not communicating compatibly with the system — likely something on ATI/AMD’s part, not Apple’s.
1) I didn’t take any screencap readings of the temps right before doing the following work, so I lack the quality of data of the MBP thermal dissipation mod I did last weekend. So this is worth keeping in mind if you’re thinking about doing something like this the next time you open your aluminium PowerBook 15/17.
OK. Let’s get back to this.
3) iStat Menus version 4.00 and on through 4.22 are Intel-only and, as far as I recall, run only on Intel Snow Leopard and up. Version 4.22 is what I used on the linked post above for the C2D MBP from 2008. Version 4.x and higher brought in the active line charts for temperatures and other sensors. Here’s an example of version 4.22 from that MBP:
For PowerPC Macs, the ceiling for iStat Menus is version 3.19 (which works all the way up to 10.5.8 and the PowerPC-bootable 10.6 developer builds). Version 3.x lacks these and only displays current temperatures at any given moment:
2) I don’t know whether this is a quirk limited to just the Mobility Radeon 9700 GPUs installed in all of the 1.67MHz PowerBooks (both DLSD and SLSD) or something more broadly to Radeon 9xxx-series GPUs in Mac laptops, but the GPU sensor temperature on both my A1138 and A1139 G4s are notorious for showing a GPU sensor temperature of 100°C when the system is completely idle and, when a GPU-related load is applied, the GPU temperature actually drops from 100°C (in the above cap, 91°C showed up shortly after the idle 100, because I was actually using the system). Note: this sensor, on either of my PowerBooks, has never shown higher than 100°C, ever. But I can verify that the 100°C reading at idle is woefully incorrect. High heat would be borne out by hot-to-the-touch case temperatures, and this isn’t the case, ever, with the inaccurately high readings. I have no earthly idea why these PowerBooks do this. I chalk it up to ATI’s temperature sensor in the GPU die not communicating compatibly with the system — likely something on ATI/AMD’s part, not Apple’s.
1) I didn’t take any screencap readings of the temps right before doing the following work, so I lack the quality of data of the MBP thermal dissipation mod I did last weekend. So this is worth keeping in mind if you’re thinking about doing something like this the next time you open your aluminium PowerBook 15/17.
OK. Let’s get back to this.
For my PowerBook G4s, I use some iteration of G4FanControl — in Leopard, the GUI version, and in SL-PPC, the command-line version. At start-up, I have all three sensors set to 48°C — meaning, the fans kick on when the sensors rise above that threshold. Of course, with the GPU readings never being correct, I’m not altogether sure from where all three of those GPU sensor readings originate. There’s “CPU bottom”, “CPU/Intrepid Bottom”, and the inaccurate “GPU” sensor. That said, when the first two sensors are below 48°C, even if the GPU sensor reports 100°C, both fans stay off, so who even knows.
For the PowerBook G4 on which I did this mod, the A1138, I’m accustomed to seeing the right fan kick on first and, in the past, at a slightly higher overall speed than the left fan. It’s not unusual for the right fan to be just above 2000rpm while the left fan is in the mid-to-high 1000s. The A1138’s fans max out in the low-to-mid 3000rpm range (the A1139s use a different fan design and manufacturer, and those can top out at over 6000rpm).
The approach I followed with the PowerBook differs from the MBP linked above.
The MBP’s heat sink assembly is two pipes which are mounted about 1mm above the bottom case, and in factory configuration, makes the fans do most, if not nearly all of the thermal dissipation work. The A1138, meanwhile, has a different heat sink assembly. For one, it lives about 5.5mm above the bottom case, kept there by bottom case stand-offs. The does allow some air to circulate beneath the heat sink assembly in ways which the 17-inch MBP cannot, so there is some passive cooling to be eked from that design decision alone.
Also, there is a metal plate integrated into the PowerBook’s heat sink assembly’s design. That plate is peppered with holes of about 6–10mm. These holes increase the surface area of the heat sink assembly’s edges through which air can move and make contact with the holes’ edges, also helping with passive cooling (one can also see several of these 5.5mm stand-offs in this view of the assembly, shown upside-down from how it’s configured when reassembled):
A thermal pad mod here, if one is to be tried, requires a different approach.
For the MBP, the objective was to make it less hot to use on a lap (by de-localizing where passive thermal dissipation ended up under the bottom case). For the PowerBook, the objective I’m after is to keep the CPU/GPU/Intrepid as cool as possible; to mitigate the need for fan-based active cooling; and to keep the fans spinning at lower RPM and, thus, quiet(er) (which could be a higher priority for PowerBooks with only one fan and their tendency to make a lot of noise whilst hot, such as on 12-inch and Titanium models).
Expectations for the outcome here are going to be different than with that MBP — namely, does anything actually improve with this thermal pad modification?
What I chose to do was to focus on the solid metal anchors, the areas resembling grey plates, directly under/opposite the three heatsink areas — seen above as those grey areas covering up the copper heat pipe. As the bottom case stands measure about 5.5mm and the grey plates are about 2mm high, I went with a plan to apply 3.5–4.0mm “stacks” of the same silicone thermal pad material I used with the MBP mod.
Unlike the MBP, I wanted these thermal pad “stacks” to assist the grey plate areas directly beneath the heat-generating chips by bridging them directly to the bottom case and shunting some of the passive cooling directly to the bottom case itself (i.e., by making direct contact with the bottom case), whilst leaving be the rest of the grey metal plate (with the holes) as they continue with the same, as-designed, air-based passive cooling:
Were one to flip over the assembly, as one can see on the iFixit guides (below), there are two copper plates — one each for the GPU and the CPU — and a centre area which, in OEM form, includes a foam-based thermal pad for the Agere Intrepid IC (which, if I understand correctly, is a combination northbridge/memory controller):
Unlike the CPU and GPU, the Agere Intrepid IC in the middle is basically a big square of black plastic.
[On my PowerBook, the big, off-white square foam thermal pad you see above did not cover up another copper square but, rather, the same exposed heat pipe and metal plate with those holes. In my PowerBooks, that OEM pad disintegrated a long time ago, and I removed its oily, degraded self in 2020.]
During my last clean-out two years ago, I applied a line of thermal paste along the Agere Intrepid plastic cover to run parallel with the copper beneath. For this mod, I cut a 1mm-thick strip of silicone-based thermal pad to replace the paste from 2020, but only as a strip aligned with and as wide as the copper, not as a square (as I didn’t note a change in temperature from the “CPU/Intrepid” sensor after making that prior change with paste — i.e., it never gets as hot as the CPU, even when under high load).
As with before, direct contact between copper plates and both GPU/CPU was handled with Noctua NT-H2 thermal paste. The stuff just works.
Before reassembling, this is how the “stack” modification appeared prior to flipping over the heat sink assembly:
(I also took the time to clean the not-very-dirty fan blades and to add fresh lubrication to the spindles, much as I did about a year ago.)
SO HOW DID IT GO?
The short answer: the modification didn’t hurt the PowerBook at all. Did it help with cooling? Hard to say just yet.
The two differences I’m able to suss from before/after, given how I’m unable to access temp and fan data points over time:
1) The three areas (well, more like the two areas of the CPU and Intrepid) on the bottom case, directly underneath the stacks, are a bit warmer than I remember them being before. This suggests that the stacks are working as intended.
2) The fans still run at or above 48°C, whilst idling, due to my G4FanControl settings. I am noting their velocities now run in the 1200–1300rpm range, whereas before it was common before to see at least one of them flirt with 2000rpm from time to time and stick comfortably in the 1500–1800rpm range. This could also be due to a fresh round of lubrication on the spindles.
CONCLUSION
What I should have done for this before/after test: set G4FanControl to a high threshold (but not so high as to damage the chips; anything up to 70°C should be fine for this setting). Then, push the PowerBook (i.e., run a video for 5 minutes, followed by halting the video) and find where the CPU and Intrepid find their equilibrium temperatures with passive-cooling only. As I only did the “after”, playing back a 360p YT clip and opening the iSight FW camera, I could push the PowerBook to 68°C CPU and 57°C Intrepid without fans; the localized underside locations were hot to the touch.
After the mod, I’ve noted how after following these steps and letting passive cooling, including with my “stack” mod, handle all the heat management, the CPU returns to an idle temp at around 49–50°C, and the Intrepid hovers around 47–48°C. This is whilst Interweb-PPC, Terminal, and Finder are also running on SL-PPC, but with nothing else drawing from processing resources.
This is, frankly, marginally warmer than with my usual G4FanControl settings of 48°C, but not far from what my C2D MBP runs when it’s idling (i.e., 50–54°C, though its fans always run by design). With G4FanControl set to 48°C, CPU and Intrepid hum along at around 45°C as the fans run between 1190 and 1260rpm. [UPDATE after about 30 minutes of idling at the G4FanControl 48°C setting: CPU is at 45°C, Intrepid is at 44°C and both fans have shut off entirely. The ambient room temperature is just a smidge over 23°C.]
I hesitate to make a definitive declaration, but provisionally, this modification seems to aid slightly with passive cooling. By how much? I don’t yet know.
Is it worth it to you to try? I also don’t know, but it isn’t liable to impede on the as-designed passive cooling at all and, if anything, might aid things somewhat. If you already have sheets of silicone thermal pad handy, then it can’t hurt to give it a try. The thermal pad sheets (the ones I ordered were 10x10cm) are pretty cheap, and they’re offered in different thicknesses.
tl;dr: I’ll be making this same modification with my A1139 on a forthcoming weekend, and I’ll do better diligence with chronicling and recording before-and-after temperatures. But hopefully this should give y’all a starting sense of whether having heat move directly to the bottom case, via a trio of solid, thermal pad stacks/columns located directly beneath each heat generator, helps with overall cooling efficiency.
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I used one of my PowerBooks to create and upload a website to the garden's web hosting. I'm not sure if it's web 1.1 compliant, but it should be close. I tested it with Lynx, Safari 4, and RetroZilla. If you use an old plug-in enabled browser with javascript enabled, you will have a better experience with it however.
It's nothing fancy, but here it is: http://home.macintosh.garden/~wicknix/
Cheers
It's nothing fancy, but here it is: http://home.macintosh.garden/~wicknix/
Cheers
