Recent content by herd

As an experiment, I attached a thermocouple to a resistor rated for 1/4w and wrapped it in foam. At 0.1w the resistor was over 100º and it quickly self-destructed at 0.2w. I took another similar resistor, rated for 1/4w, and dipped it in water. How much power do you think it could handle...

For upgrading the Pismo CPU there are a few options. A faster version of the same G3 (750S or 750L) can be installed to achieve ~550MHz. A later version of the G3 can be installed (750F or 750G) to achieve ~1GHz. An early G4 can be installed (7400 or 7410) to achieve ~550MHz with a MUCH...

Measuring the total power used by a graphics card is more complicated, but I saw a nice project where someone is gathering actual data: tehsiggi.github.io/agp-power-monitor/ Some of the cards tested are suitable for the Cube.

I think the problem is more likely to be a bad solder joint. If you can get the board set up in a way that you can test it on the bench, a common diagnostic procedure is to press on the suspect chip or lightly flex the PCB. The SRAM pins are exposed and you may even be able to see a bad joint...

Nice find! Thanks for sharing. Do you have plans for it?

What CPU does it have? I would guess that a 1.4GHz upgrade uses a 7455, and if so it would not need anything changed in the firmware.

If quake is your measure of daily usage, then yes, the only thing faster than a pentiumTM is another one with more cache. My point is, I think you are looking at a very narrow part of the scene and the comparison is not objective. Even including other games, on nearly the same hardware, shows...

I was curious so I looked and the dnet statistics server is still up: cgi.distributed.net/speed/ You can pull up graphs like this: The thruput is fairly linear vs clock speed, and the slope of the lines shows the efficiency of the chip. For this thread, here are some specific results I...

Respectfully, I disagree. I think that would be one of the worst ways. Even among contemporary x86 chips, quake is notorious for skewing results due to the hand-tuned assembly made specifically for that particular FPU. There are detailed explanations of this available. If quake is the only...

There is still a lot of good info in archives of cubeowner.com

I thought I'd share a little weekend project here. I picked up a "dead" Digital Audio tower and below are some steps I took to restore and upgrade it using extra parts I had. It was in pretty sad condition when I got it. I'm a little curious about its history because judging by the dust...

I can't think of any issues in particular; these are generally nice and reliable. I'd look at the usual things to check on a used computer: cosmetic condition, function, corrosion, broken ports, dirt/smoke/fur, upgrades installed, etc. The power supply should probably be re-capped (or at least...

Are you using a little thumb drive, or a whole disc? If the port works with other devices, it could be that it can't power the drive. Does the drive enclosure allow external power? If the MDD works, you could put the powerbook into target mode and connect it to the MDD as an external firewire...

With a few versions to compare, that location seems to agree with the cache speed. 133MHz 0x86, 150MHz 0x98, 167MHz 0xB1. Maybe 0xFC is faster than it expects. You could try some other values to see what it does. If you change it to 0x86 then it should slow down to match the iMac version...

Nice work! What does the Lombard EEPROM dump look like? If the Wallstreet CPU had cache chips rated for 150MHz, what is the speed rating of the Lombard cache chips? In the Wallstreet ROM, the 0x98 at offset $012 may be the cache speed. What happens if you change this to 0xFC?