beachycove
Well-known member
OK, maybe not a hack, but it's hack-ish. I wanted to do simple gaming on my Quad G5.
This G5, on which I have previously hacked a wee bit by removing clogging filters and clogging microchannel inserts etc. from the LCS (it runs absolutely FINE without them), has the stock NVidia 6600, 256mb video card. This is not a gaming card, clearly, but it is inherently capable of the kind of 3D graphics that I need for old PPC games, all the same, as my needs are pretty basic. However, the machine was always essentially useless for gaming, because as soon as a game would begin, the fans would ramp up enormously.
I decided for various reasons last weekend to investigate the problem using the old free utility Temperature Monitor, which has the virtue of tracking temperatures graphically across a period of usage, operating all the while in the background. On running a couple of the kids' old favourites Ottomatic and Marble Blast for 30 minutes or so, I discovered that during said 30 minutes, the processors were not stressed in the slightest, and that all of the irritating fan activity was due to increased loads on the graphics card, which got seriously hot.
So last weekend, amid a flurry of other G5-related hacking, I popped a small case fan on the video card, using "legs" made of looped household insulated wiring, and ran a power feed to the DVD power connector. I then fired up the Quad, and a game. The result was that no more fans went ballistic. The hacked case fan being just a little too loud, I finally added a resistor to the power line to slow it down, and now, I have to tell you, my Quad G5 makes a pleasing PPC gaming machine.
Yes, I could have gone and bought a fancypants replacement video card with integral cooling fans, but I had this little fan in a box, so making use of that was $75 saved, and the result was one more piece of computer crap out of a box and put to use....
Reflecting on this, I decided to try and take the whole business one step further. I have a spare blower fan from the HD cooling bay of a parts G5. I've bought a 4-pin fan power splitter off ebay, and once it arrives, I will try connecting two fans to the one logic board power connection, one to the hard drive and one for the video card. The point of this is to see if the machine will blow air over the video card at variable rates. I'm reasoning that gaming will stress the hard drives enough to ramp up the fan, and do the same for the video card. Well, we shall see.
I'm very pleased with this little correction to the work of Apple's engineers. A small cooling fan on the stock video card is enough to make the Quad a much better machine.
This G5, on which I have previously hacked a wee bit by removing clogging filters and clogging microchannel inserts etc. from the LCS (it runs absolutely FINE without them), has the stock NVidia 6600, 256mb video card. This is not a gaming card, clearly, but it is inherently capable of the kind of 3D graphics that I need for old PPC games, all the same, as my needs are pretty basic. However, the machine was always essentially useless for gaming, because as soon as a game would begin, the fans would ramp up enormously.
I decided for various reasons last weekend to investigate the problem using the old free utility Temperature Monitor, which has the virtue of tracking temperatures graphically across a period of usage, operating all the while in the background. On running a couple of the kids' old favourites Ottomatic and Marble Blast for 30 minutes or so, I discovered that during said 30 minutes, the processors were not stressed in the slightest, and that all of the irritating fan activity was due to increased loads on the graphics card, which got seriously hot.
So last weekend, amid a flurry of other G5-related hacking, I popped a small case fan on the video card, using "legs" made of looped household insulated wiring, and ran a power feed to the DVD power connector. I then fired up the Quad, and a game. The result was that no more fans went ballistic. The hacked case fan being just a little too loud, I finally added a resistor to the power line to slow it down, and now, I have to tell you, my Quad G5 makes a pleasing PPC gaming machine.
Yes, I could have gone and bought a fancypants replacement video card with integral cooling fans, but I had this little fan in a box, so making use of that was $75 saved, and the result was one more piece of computer crap out of a box and put to use....
Reflecting on this, I decided to try and take the whole business one step further. I have a spare blower fan from the HD cooling bay of a parts G5. I've bought a 4-pin fan power splitter off ebay, and once it arrives, I will try connecting two fans to the one logic board power connection, one to the hard drive and one for the video card. The point of this is to see if the machine will blow air over the video card at variable rates. I'm reasoning that gaming will stress the hard drives enough to ramp up the fan, and do the same for the video card. Well, we shall see.
I'm very pleased with this little correction to the work of Apple's engineers. A small cooling fan on the stock video card is enough to make the Quad a much better machine.
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