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[Knezzen]

So, what did you do?

Soldered it like the resistors MacTron found was changed and put som Arctic Silver 5 on it. Booted right away.
The old thermal paste must have been really crappy.

[GaryN]

Good work!

[Knezzen]

Just won a dual 1.8ghz MDX on eBay. When it arrives I will try to break the 2ghz barrier. So stay tuned, theres more to come in this thread!

[Knezzen]

Just to keep this thread alive a bit. I have been busy with a big move and have sort of just finished building the last kitchen (built three new kitchens in the house). I helped my mother in law move in one of the apartments upstairs (I bought an old apartment building), so I more or less have time now for computer related projects.

Fury was kind enough to donate a copper heatsink out of a dual 1.42ghz MDD to me. Thanks for that!
When it gets here I think I have enough cooling power to cool the (hopefully) overclocked 1.8ghz MDX.

More to come in the very near future! After that there will be new releases of MacTorrent, more new OS 9 software from the new CrapSoft HQ etc

[Knezzen]

Did someone say "Worlds fastest MDD"?

[devils_advisor]

lord almighty

[mrhappy]

Sweet Jesus!!!! Go Knez!

[Knezzen]

So, let me explain what I did. In the picture shown here is what I like to call the "settings block" for the Sonnet CPU daughter card.
These resistors control the chip that actually sets the CPU voltage and multiplier settings, hence why I can overclock the CPU's by setting these three in different ways.

Setting the 1.8ghz MDX up for 2ghz is by far the easiest overclock I'v done.
All you do is remove/desolder the resistor on R104 in the picture and you got 2ghz.
It even runs at 2ghz with the stock MDX heatsink with little temperature raise compared to when running at 1.8ghz.

The best thing to do, though (for any MDX owner, I guess), is to put the stock MDD heatsink on.
It drastically lowers the temperature compared to using the stock MDX heatsink.

[MacTron]

... Great! 
now we have the speed settings of the card combining the 103 and 104 resistors ...
I have a question: Does the 1.6 module support the 1.8 Ghz speed and later 2.0 Ghz ? , or was the 1.8 that achieve the 2.0 Ghz?

[Knezzen]

... Great! 
now we have the speed settings of the card combining the 103 and 104 resistors ...
I have a question: Does the 1.6 module support the 1.8 Ghz speed and later 2.0 Ghz ? , or was the 1.8 that achieve the 2.0 Ghz?

The 1.6ghz MDX actually runs at 1.58ghz and uses two allready overclocked 7447A CPU's marked with 1.25ghz. It can do 1.67ghz with stock MDX cooling without any problems and 1.8ghz with better cooling (aluminium or copper MDD heatsink).

The 1.8ghz MDX uses two allready overclocked 7447B's marked with 1.67ghz. It can do 2ghz with stock MDX cooling as long as you have the small Sonnet fan in place. Will probably do a bit more with better cooling.

Will try to get further when the copper heatsink from Fury arrives

[LillyOmegaWolf]

I wonder, is it worth it at all to put dual 2ghz into my current 1.42ghz dual FW800 G4 powermac?
If I see the Dual 1.8 on ebay that is.

[Knezzen]

Well, that's hard to answer. What's "worth it" for you might not be what's "worth it" for me.

I do have benchmarks of my old Dual 1.5ghz MDD CPU (overclocked from the stock 1.25ghz), so I should be able to benchmark the dual 2ghz soon so you can see for yourself if it's "worth it" or not

I overclocked the 1.6ghz and 1.8ghz MDX just to see if it could be done, so I (and indeed we) know.

[GaryN]

I wonder, is it worth it at all to put dual 2ghz into my current 1.42ghz dual FW800 G4 powermac?
If I see the Dual 1.8 on ebay that is.

As someone who has done exactly that, I can tell you that perspective is important here. "Upping" your 1.42 to 1.8 and expecting your MDD to suddenly act like a new Mac Pro will leave you sorely disappointed. By that I mean you have to remember that how fast a computer "feels" is a product of multiple factors of which CPU speed is only one. Bus speed, HDD access time, RAM all have a say in how it moves along.

Nothing will give an old computer a "shot in the arm" generally than to replace an old HDD with an SSD, since that's one of the bottlenecks that shows almost constantly. However, upgrading the CPU to 1.8 will make a serious improvement if you run processor-heavy / processor-dependent tasks like rendering video, managing gigantic spreadsheets, large Mp3 encodes etc. Tasks that require a lot of computation will benefit most. Note: I was going to say "anything will benefit" but that may not always be true. The 7447 PPC chip, while clocked faster, has no level 3 cache and there may (stress may because knowing for certain would require a lot of serious testing) be more or less benefit for different tasks.

That said, while I did see a noticeable improvement going from 1.42 to 1.8, it was definitely not as dramatic and as obvious as I would have liked considering the cost. But, when I do those kinds of things like say, repeated AAC or Mp3 test encodes, it's really nice to have.

[LillyOmegaWolf]

Well, I would mostly be doing it just to see my loverly 1.42 dual go up to a crazy 2ghz. I use my Xeon Hackintosh for editing films and commercial jobs with FCPX so don't exactly need a powerful old computer for work purposes. It would be mostly for fun. OS9 utilises it okay? I see that it gets recognised alright.

I'm also keen to get improved cooling set up with the G4, OS9 with FCP3, photoshop 7 and whatever else I can think of, plus old pre-OSX games along with my collection of older OSX games. This mac does get used from time to time for its legacy FCP 6 in Tiger already as some clients in india want things that FCPX gets a little lost over. I rather imagine I would see a boost to my render times for 2k video on that.
I'm used to living on SSD so its other parts of the system that will be my bottleneck.   

I'm interested in trying to put OS9 on it but the unofficial G4 installer just fails on the mac icon before the loading bar... any ideas on how to fix that?
If I can get OS9 on there it sure will be a faster archiver/unarchiver than my G3 ibook clamshell

What would I need to look up to find this processor upgrade?

[GaryN]

You have a late FW800 MDD.  So, you need this: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,2143.msg11047.html#msg11047

You HDD or SSD also needs to have OS9 drivers installed at the root level which may require you to backup your OSX install and reinitialize the drive first with said drivers, then restore OSX and install the above version of OS9.

Info is here: http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.php?cat=314#position_content

[LillyOmegaWolf]

Ah yes, I may have forgotten the OS9 drivers as that mac cant install them when using OSX.

[Dogcow]

Just did the mod (removing R104) on my dual 1.8. Works great! Over an hour of maximum load with youtube videos, geekbench anything I can run to keep it pegged at 100% for each CPU. Temperatures stay at or under 50C (with original aluminum heatsink and an extra 120mm fan on it).

Thanks for the legwork folks so that others may enjoy this great mod

[IIO]

dubbla processereren.

[redstudio]

and fantastic MDX sonnet overclock!.. I should soon become the owner of a 1.6 but reading it isn't very clear to me how to set the resistors to set speed 1.67 or 1.83 mhz for the 1.6 model. Could you make a simple diagram of how to set the resistors? Thank you

[Knezzen]

and fantastic MDX sonnet overclock!.. I should soon become the owner of a 1.6 but reading it isn't very clear to me how to set the resistors to set speed 1.67 or 1.83 mhz for the 1.6 model. Could you make a simple diagram of how to set the resistors? Thank you

Thank you! Yes indeed, that sounds like a good idea! I'll do a simple diagram and upload here.