How-To: Upgrade The Processor On An Older Macintosh G4

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Yes there’s still a how-to this week, even though we pretty much how-to’ed a hack-cake yesterday for our HADA01 celebration.  Here’s the low down on today’s how-to up on engadget:

I bought an older graphite 400 mhz G4 tower from ebay.de (germany is a great place to buy tech here in europe) a while back. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed “Sawtooth”, are really good (i.e. there weren’t huge amounts of AGP G4’s that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading I learned that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. I decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: I was not payed by Powerlogix nor did I receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After having a really hard time getting this proc upgrad to work, I just  wanted to put this information out there to help who it may as clearly as possible, after all I never enjoy seeing macs in the trash (unless I get to take them home and adopt them!)

Click to read “How-To: Upgrade the processor on an older macintosh G4” on engadget

11 thoughts on “How-To: Upgrade The Processor On An Older Macintosh G4

  1. what I dont understand is when i upgraded the processor in my laptop nobody cared, a large group were talking about doing it on the AMD forums but they were afraid. I went and did and it works (but my battery life sucks, more than it sucked before). and my laptop is still under warranty. it must just be cool because macs have a lot of fanboys now.

    i used thermal paste and i wasnt scared, who is scared of thermal paste? thermal paste is a good thing, way better than those “thermal pads” oem put on the cpu.

  2. What is with the dupes between engadget and hackaday, it is really annoying to go from one site to the other and see the same exact story, exact same wording, exact same… You get the idea.

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