The Finished Article #2
Once the SATA cables had arrived, everything could be finished off.
The SATA card had to move sockets and for some reason this prevented the machine from booting, so I ended up having to reinstall OS X. That was pretty much the only hiccup in the new system and CPU temperatures are now far better at low fan speeds, sitting in the low-to-mid forties when doing the everyday jobs of web, email, iPhoto and iTunes. A tiny 35 degrees is common for some time after first booting while the coolant gets up to temperature.
The big Panaflo is powered from the motherboard in the same way that it used to be, resulting in it being temperature controlled. A few tweaks to AppleFan.kext has this ramping up the speed at 54 degrees now, instead of 57, which it only ever reaches during some serious number crunching and Photoshop hammer. The big Papst is permanently running at 5V, pulling cool air over the hard drives and onto the CPU board. It takes its power from a joint connecter shared with the coolant pump, it getting 5V, the pump getting 12V.
The SATA drives now have proper right-angled SATA power and data cables, which are absolutely necessary as without them the case just won't close. As the drives are mounted upside down in the front caddy, 'left handed' SATA data cables are required, which I found at cablecity.co.uk. The power cable was fairly easy to make as certain SATA connnectors can be dismantled and reassembled onto new cable. Just take care when taking them apart - they are pretty flimsy and the clips break very easily!
And now for the surprise! If you didn't notice in the previous pictures, the ATI 9800 Pro has gone, replaced by something rather special: an nVidia 7800GS! This is an XFX 256MB Extreme Edition card that has been specially modified to work in Macs by Steve Smedley and the folks at Strangedogs, and it's absolutely fantastic. After having a new EPROM chip soldered on and a recrafted 7800GT ROM flashed to it, the card has been clocked at 460MHz for the GPU and 1400MHz for the GDDR3 RAM. Playing Doom 3 on this machine is completely amazing, with shadows and FSAA both enabled.
Many people have said that faster graphics in a G4 is pointless due to bus limitations, but the trick is that you have to strike a balance between the amount of data (ie. textures) pushed onto the card and what the card does internally. The difference between having shadows on and shadows off with the 7800 is a mere 1 frame per second, and FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) has a similarly small impact on frame rates as it is mostly handled by the GPU, independent from the CPU and the system bus. By the same logic, large screen modes for games are now easily processed too. It's very impressive.
In this shot you can see how the Aquagate pump block is attached to the Apple processor module using a large copper shim and custom stainless steel plate. The shim spans both processors, transferring heat into the pump block.
End of Part 2 >>