So all of the parts (less the Airport Card) came in the mail today. The guy that sold me the cube, forgot to package the power supply with the cube though. You'd think I was screwed. Someone out there was looking out for me tonight that's for sure. I bought a VGAtor from Dr. Bott about a month ago to hook my PowerBook up to my Cinema Display. The VGAtor's power supply is a G4 Cube power supply. Not LIKE a G4 Cube Power Supply, not RESEMBLING a G4 Cube Power Supply, but definitely a G4 Cube Power Supply. It even has the Apple logo on it and original power cable. I imagine if there were enough G4 Cube Power Supplies out there for Dr. Bott to acquire them all, there might be a giant dumpster with G4 Cubes out there that never got sold. What a shame. I digress.
Friday, July 9th, 2004
Formatted Cube, writing Zeros to the drive and installed Mac OS X 10.3.0. Ran XBench on the Cube for a "Pre-Mod" Benchmark. Here are the results:
Code:
StartUp:
1:14
XBench
Result: 70.29
CPU Test: 53.40
Thread Test: 41.76
Memory Test: 81.88
Quartz Graphics Test: 70.25
OpenGL Graphics Test: 80.31
User Interface Test: 106.56
Disk Test: 115.79
I don't know what any of that means, I just want something to compare it to later. I plan on comparing it to the Post-Mod Cube and my current production machine, a PowerBook G4 12" (Rev. A).
Hard Drive Installation - 120 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda
Picture
So I got the hard drive and I didn't know whether to set it to master or slave so I set it to Cable Select. I disassembled the entire cube, and installed the Hard Drive. Install was very minimal. Very easy to do. Put cube back together, booted it and it turned on but nothing happened. I quickly realized that the hard drive has to be set to Master and redid the install. It booted perfectly. Hard Drive has a very low bassy hum to it. A little annoying but worth it for the capacity it offers.
Mac OS X Install - Mac OS X 10.3.0
Booted up the computer and the new hard drive didn't show up at all in the Install Window so I went to Disc Utility and formatted the drive with Zeros. When I went back to the install window, the hard drive showed up but there was a red "X' over it and it said I couldn't install on this disc. I reformatted a couple of different ways and still got the red X. Frustrated, I restarted the machine and no more red X. Customized the Install with X11, did the full install, including Dev Tools and Optimization.
Processor Upgrade - PowerLogix 1.0 Ghz G4 Chip
Shut down computer for about 10 minutes to cool the processor then booted it back up again because I realized I needed to apply a firmware update to the computer to work with the 7457 Chipset. When I booted back up, and tried to install the firmware it told me I needed to install Apple Firmware 4.1.9 first. So I downloaded Apple Firmware 4.1.9 for the cube and then realized I needed an OS 9 partition to boot from. OS 9? WHAT THE HECK IS THAT?! Where am I gonna find an OS 9 CD??? I checked my PowerBook box to see if it came with an OS 9 Boot CD (12" PowerBook Rev. A). No CD. Only OS X. Called my parents (17" iMac), same deal. Carracho? I think I got laughed at a lot. Finally only one place to turn. Torrents. The dark side of illegal file sharing on the Mac. Found an OS 9.1 Boot Disc (God I hope the cube will boot 9.1) with 9.2.2 Updaters and started to download. Oh good, I'm averaging about 9.1 K/sec. Should be done downloading in about 20 hours. Well I guess that's it for me then tonight. I shall continue tomorrow night if I have an OS 9 Boot Disc.
It's the next day and Mac OS 9 is done downloading and ready for installation. I burned it to a disc and then burned the Mac OS 9.2 and 9.2.2 updaters to another. Booted up from the Mac OS 9 Disc and installed it onto my iPod. I then restarted the computer booting from the iPod and ejecting the OS 9 disc. Unstuffed the ".bin" files of the OS 9.2.2 upgrade archives. Of course it caused some sort of error and cause Mac OS 9 to crash. I can't believe we ever got any work done in this God Forsaken Operating System. Anyways Force Restart. Even though it crashed, it unstuffed OS 9.2.2 successfully. Installing. Unrecoverable Error. Force Restart. Seriously. Sucks. Ok maybe I can apply the 4.1.9 patch in OS 9.0. Ok it worked. Sweet. Ok nice restart, then apply the PowerLogix Firmware. Ok that worked. Time to install the processor.
First few screws on the top of the cube, need a T-10 Screwdriver, no problem. Except one of them is stripped. Wait, you can actually remove the side rail that the stripped screw is screwed into. Nice. Ok out of the woods. The video on how to do the processor just froze on my PowerBook. OK Quit VLC, restart it, won't play. Ok Eject the disc, reinsert it. Unrecognizable. Starting to think I should just leave this to professionals. I press on. Restart PowerBook, Insert DVD, watch the video. Working again. The rest of the upgrade goes off without a hitch. The PowerLogix video was very blurry and pixelated at times. The entire time I did the upgrade I thought to myself "There's no way I am doing this right. There is no way this computer is going to boot." I can't believe it worked. I did install the PowerLogix fan and I have to admit, that is a quiet fan. I am sitting at my desk and can not hear it over the low hum of the hard drive. MUCH quieter than my PowerBook fan. One thing I do have to mention is in the video, PowerLogix doesn't show you or tell you that you need to swap out the Cube's heatsink onto the new heatsink and apply the thermal paste to the processor. I pretty much guessed that that needed to be done, so just an FYI for anyone that is attempting this.
Optical Drive Upgrade - Panasonic 4x DVD-RW
Well the cube has been running strong now for about 20 minutes with no hiccups, then again I haven't really pushed it yet. That'll be the real test later, atleast for now I know that it is working great. Time to take apart the cube yet again and upgrade the optical drive. DVD-ROMs just don't cut it anymore. Ok well the drive is a little different than the one I bought. Ok so there is no way this is going to work.
Notice the ports on the exact opposite sides of the drive from one another?
How the IDE Conversion Board is supposed to Look
How it looked on the new drive
The
good folks over at ESBuy.com allowed me to return the drive and I will be getting my money back as I search for other options. By the way, if you even need any sort of DVD-R/RW/+R/+RW/RAM/Anything that has to do with optical drives for the mac or PC, esbuy.com has the best prices hands down and their customer service is bar none. Check them out.
After ordering a Cube upgrade kit from the fine folks at OWC (instead of waiting 4 weeks for one from MCE), it came in the mail the very next day. That's service with a smile for sure. The upgrade was as simple as they come. They built a great little metal frame and adapter for the Cube to allow for it's weird interface for the CD drive. Honestly not much I can say about this upgrade, 4 screws out, 4 screws in, and it works great. Also don't forget, if you have installed an upgraded hard drive into the cube, you will need to change the jumper on the hard drive from master to slave, since the DVD-RW is a master drive by default.
Graphics Card Upgrade - ATI Radeon 7500
Removed the AGP Riser card from the motherboard. Removed the Rage 128 card from the AGP Riser. Took off the Rage Bezel and took off the Bezel from the new Radeon card. I matched them up back to back and drew lines where the bezel needs to be cut by a Sheet Metal Nibbler. Took to a metal fabrication place and had it cut. Installed the bezel onto the new Radeon, fit like a charm. Installed the card, boot up the cube. No Problems, ended up working out perfectly.
Now that I have the Processor, New Hard Drive, and New Graphics card in, it's time for a little XBench:
Code:
StartUp:
0:47
XBench
Result: 92.15
CPU Test: 118.66
Thread Test: 83.40
Memory Test: 70.56
Quartz Graphics Test: 90.50
OpenGL Graphics Test: 86.88
User Interface Test: 103.09
Disk Test: 109.69
Serene Screen MacQuarium Screen Saver
FPS: Constant 79-80 FPS
I added the Screen Saver benchmark because I wanted to see what this thing could really do. I ran the screen saver on my PowerBook G4 12" and it never even hit over 65 FPS, and it varied a lot between 50-60 FPS.
Airport Card Install
Well if anyone ever has to install an Airport Card into a G4 Cube, they should only be worried about one thing. Buying one. Not that it was hard now, but I would imagine into the future since this is now an obsolete part, that it would be hard to find Airport Cards. Once found though, it involves taking the core out of the cube and simply pushing the card into it's slot. It's very simple. I did it on my lunch break in under 5 minutes. Once you boot back up in Mac OS X 10.3, it will tell you that a new network port has been added and take you directly to your system preferences where you can choose an airport network to join and add the very useful airport menu extra to the menubar. I have an existing Airport Extreme base station that the cube is joining which may become an Airport Express base station in the near future.
Bluetooth Module Install
Installed the Bluetooth Module in one of the USB Ports of the cube. I instantly got a link light on the bluetooth module and paired it with a Sony Ericsson T630, Apple Wireless Keyboard and Wireless mouse. The Menu Extra instantly showed up along with the preference pane. No problem on this installation.
RAM Upgrade
Another super easy installation. Drove down to Wilshire Blvd. and talked to my friends at MacSolutions and picked up (3) 512 MB RAM chips for the cube to max it out at an amazing 1.5 GB of RAM. It took longer to drive down there, sit in the traffic on the 405 Southbound than to actually open the cube and install the chips. The entire installation took about 2 minutes max. The RAM was instantly recognized and the computer booted up perfectly.
This is a very beautiful thing.
Fan Upgrade - GigaDesigns' Cube Fan Kit
This is one bad ass fan. Just as quiet as the previous fan, but with the BONUS of a blue LED. It looks pretty neat coming out the bottom of the cube, but the beauty of it is looking at it from above. From an outsider's perspective, there is just an ambient blue light lighting up the internal components of the cube. Also from above, if you have a reflective desk surface, like a shiny black or finished wood, the blue light will bounce off the shiny surface and from above light up the lucite sides giving the cube itself a very bluish tint. It's very sexy...as far as computers go. For the frivolous cube lover, this is a must have!
Top of the Cube
Bottom of the Cube
File Transfer
File Transfer, while long, went off without a hitch. I have all of my software imaged to an external FireWire drive which makes it very easy to just double click the image, have it mount and then install over firewire. I don't have to worry about CDs being scratched or the CD skipping in the drive, it also seems to be a much faster installation of the software, although I have no hard benchmarks to back me up. After all the software was installed, I did all of the software updating (all software updates I also have saved on the same external hard drive). Then I ran software update a few times (have the cubed connected to the Ethernet port on my Airport Extreme). Then I transferred all data from my PowerBook to the new cube via FireWire Target Disc Mode. Worked pretty well, Mail didn't want to import my trash for a while, but I played around with it and finally got all my trash (I'm one of those people that has very few folders and just files everything in the trash and relies on the "Find" functionality of Mail. Looking forward to Spotlight in Tiger). Finally I ran iSync and synced up my iPod, T630 and Tungsten C. Everything looked good so I did one final check, made sure everything was completely working and then reformatted my PowerBook, I don't need everything on there anymore, just a bare OS X with iChat, Mail, and Safari functionality now. Benchmarks for the PowerBook G4 12" with just an OS X installation follow:
Code:
PowerBook 12" Rev. A
Startup:
1:16
XBench
Result: 89.41
CPU Test: 102.56
Thread Test: 69.87
Memory Test: 84.79
Quartz Graphics Test: 100.64
OpenGL Test: 88.78
User Interface Test: 116.16
Disk Test: 79.19
Serene Screen MacQuarium
FPS: Variable 50-65 FPS
Benchmarked Systems
PowerMac G4 Cube - Pre-Mod
450 MHz G4 Processor
512 MB RAM PC100
40 GB Maxtor Hard Drive
Rage 128 Graphics Card
PowerMac G4 Cube - Post-Mod
1 GHz G4 Processor
1.5 GB RAM PC133
120 GB Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 7500 Graphics Card
PowerBook G4 12"
867 MHz G4 Processor
640 MB RAM PC2100
80 GB Toshiba Hard Drive
NVidia GeForce4 MX
All models tested with a reformatted hard drive, and a fresh install of Mac OS X 10.3.0 and Apple's Developer's Tools installed and optimized. No other installations were made to avoid skewing results.
Final Results
Well the G4 Cube is definitely faster in the CPU and Graphics department than my PowerBook, even with a 22" Cinema attached to it. I played a little Unreal Tournament 2004 on the Cube last night and at 800x600 it's smooth as silk. As far as real world performance is considered, this machine eats up everything I throw at it. Sure I am not doing any high end audio or video, but for the hobbyist who uses Photoshop and Final Cut Express, and the amateur gamer, this machine is more than enough. I hope you enjoyed the Ultimate G4 Cube Modification.
The Setup
What's Next for the Ultimate G4 Cube?
I want to get a faster processor card but am going to wait until they are around 2 Ghz (maybe in a year or two). Now that I have the cube kit for the optical drive installed my cube, I am going to wait for about a 16-32x DVD-R to be released and upgrade that. Other than that, my cube is completed finally.