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A disassembled iMac G4 from Kijiji

This G4 (800Mhz) popped up on Kijiji the other day for 10$ in a disassembled state. Personally these don't feel old to me, I look at one and it still seems as new as it was in 2002, but I guess that's what happens. It's still my favourite Mac design of all time.

They took the hard drive out and said the computer wasn't working, so I got it back together and...sure enough it's not working, the PSU is cooked.

So I guess it's a parts machine at this point, which is kind of sad. I was hoping it would be a fairly simple machine to get running.
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Those PSUs are pretty easy to find, and replacing them is fairly straightforward.
I've already had the PSU out to do some more testing on it. I'll be on the lookout for a replacement.

Mine claims to be 150w, I'm assuming a higher wattage one would "just work" and fit, even ones from later revisions, but I'm not sure.
 
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re4mat

Well-known member
The later revision PSUs should work, but their connectors have two more pins. (16 vs. 14 on the older ones.) If you transplant the connector from the older one to a newer one, just don't connect pins 1 and 9 from the newer PSU, which are for GND and FW_PWR, respectively, on the later iMacs. The FW_PWR signal is not present on the older boards, and it should be okay without that extra common GND pin. Otherwise the pinout is identical. Be sure to put electrical tape or heat shrink on the ends so that they don't end up shorting anything while dangling around. But keep in mind that higher watts also mean more heat, so anything you can do to improve cooling will help.
 

re4mat

Well-known member
That's a really good question, and one that I wasn't thinking about when I made that statement! I got a higher wattage PSU for my iMac because I need more watts, which in turn gives off more heat. But if you're not using all of those watts, depending on the efficiency curve of the two PSUs, you may actually get less heat.

Now I want to do some experiments... :unsure:
 
And it lives. Now I just need a hard drive, I’ll probably get some kind of adapter like I did for my iBook.
 

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AndyO

Well-known member
I put an SSD in mine - it came with an IDE adaptor and was a straight swap. The original HD in mine was still working, albeit sounded like it was on its last legs, so I used SuperDuper to clone it to the SSD before swapping it out. Runs beautifully now.
 
Nice! Did you buy a replacement PSU? If so, did you get an exact match or a slightly later one?
I found an exact match, which surprised me.
I put an SSD in mine - it came with an IDE adaptor and was a straight swap. The original HD in mine was still working, albeit sounded like it was on its last legs, so I used SuperDuper to clone it to the SSD before swapping it out. Runs beautifully now.
My intention is to install some sort of solid state drive, should cut down on some heat as well which can't hurt.
 

AndyO

Well-known member
It cuts down a lot on noise, and as far as I can tell from putting my hand over the vents on the top, it also does reduce the level of heat. Probably not hugely, since the CPU and motherboard are the worst offenders, but it does seem to help.

What an SSD does more than anything though, is make the system run more smoothly. It doesn't make it all that faster, but seek times are better, so it feels rather 'snappier'.
 
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