eMac now at 900Mhz!!! (now with pics!!!)

[coius]

After following This Guide, I now have the eMac running at 900Mhz!!! It took me 1.5 hours to do the hack, but the system like boots up 10 seconds faster. on top of that, it now qualifies to run Leopard by default!!!

w00t!!! this is sooo cool, it's the FIRST soldering job I have EVER done on a machine, and it works!!!!. now to put the stand back on and get it back up on the desk (I powered it up while it was on the floor)

Anyways, pics will follow!!!

 

[coius]

Pics are in!!!

Overclocked eMac from 700->900Mhz

 

[Dan 7.1]

thats very awesome dude. grats on the success. be interesting to see how it performs over the long-term.

 

[coius]

crashed when running a Java app. I had to let it sit for 5 minutes before I could get back into OS X. ArcticSilver Heatsink Compound anyone?

I just kinda slammed the old Mount back on, eager to get it up and running. I will go in tomorrow morning and put some arctic silver on it. I shoulda thought about that before...

 

[bigD]

If you can get that thing cool enough to be stable - that's an awesome overclock. Close to 30%!

 

[coius]

Ok, i just got done popping it up and put some arctic silver in it. Hopefully that works. It seems to be stable now. Let's hope!

 

[coius]

well, i ran a heavy CPU usage test, and it seems stable. So I think it works good

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

I'm glad to see old machines get a breath of life . I'm not usually an overclocker myself but this just seems like a cool (well maybe not - perhaps quite warm) idea

 

[MultiFinder]

Dude, that's awesome. I'm glad to see an older eMac get a new lease on life. Those were epically awesome machines; I'm jealous of you (in a good way).

 

[TylerEss]

Good show, sir!

(from a chronic overclocker... I feel like I'm wasting something intangible if I'm not running a computer as fast as it can go, as opposed to as fast as its rated for)

 

[coius]

The overclocking I have done before was usually either by jumpers or by entering a BIOS to do it. This was my first major project. I need to do more tests as far as stability. I tried running World of Warcraft on it (it ran at about 15fps) and it froze up after a few minutes. I am not sure if it's the CPU or it just couldn't handle it. I *DID* notice a Frame-Rate increase from the speed bump (9fps vs. 15) but no enough to be playable. Oh well...

Like I said, I will do more tests. One thing I *DID* notice is that 10.5 would stop half-way into the installer with errors. It kept saying something about a package not passing checksum. Oh well... It's not like it performs well on my friend's iBook 1.2Ghz even (he bought mine off of me)

 

[MacJunky]

Sounds like you do in fact have issues.

Get an app that can max the CPU (SystemLoad perhaps?) and let it run overnight. If it locks up bump it down by 50Mhz and test again.

You could also have TTP4 loop it's CPU, cache and RAM tests a few dozen times or so.

 

[coius]

yeah, gonna clock it back down. it KPs whenever you copy a large amount of files off the network, or watch video, or pretty much do anything but lite web browsing. It can handle music at the same time, but beyond that, it's a no-go.

I will clock it back down to 700Mhz. Not going to mess with it

 

[Mike Richardson]

I think overclocking is great for old out of warranty machines, as long as you're careful about it. I have an iBook 700 MHz that I ran at 800 MHz using iCooked, and I overclocked the video card using ATIccelerator.

On my G5, I have overclocked the GeForce 5200 FX using Graphiccelerator to as high as I can take it (any little bit more and games will have artifacting). It did help my FPS scores in games and benchmarks since the bottleneck on my G5 is the poor graphics they put in it.

My friend runs a Beige G3 233 consistently at 300 MHz without problems using the jumper changes.

I have not done any soldering overclocks, but my friend's dad did overclock some 68K motherboards. We got an LC III running as an LC III+, and a Quadra 605 running faster, but another LC III board was unfortunately hosed.

I also had good success with the old clock chips from MC Price Breakers. My 6100/66 ran fine at 84 MHz and my 8100/100 chugged along at 120 MHz without issue. Both were good performance bumps for the machines for very little cash. My 8100 was a real workhorse back in the day. I did everything on that Mac. 8 bit emulators were awesome. (16 bit emulators were too slow though. Those I had to run on the 6500.)

 

[alk]

Could you increase the cooling with a good fan and upgraded heatsink?

Peace,

Drew

 

[MacJunky]

Could you increase the cooling with a good fan and upgraded heatsink?

The metal plate over the CPU has a heatpipe going to a chunk of heatsink sitting under the HD tray/bay/mount. There is just not enough room for a better heatsink. Better thermal compound would be good though. Was it here that I mentioned the last time I took the heatsink off a 700Mhz eMac? idk, I might do a search later to check.
Also, the eMac's fan is some screwed up proprietary funky shaped specially designed shit fan. From what I have seen you would be hard pressed to replace it decently.

 

[coius]

operation: failure

Well, today i went to set it back down to 700MHz. Botched it. The soldering pads aren't there anymore when i got done. I think my $1k weller soldering station isn't enough to let me do it. I think i gave it too much heat, and I don't think the tip is small enough to do it. I was able to lift the resistors the first time, but it looks like it's too small of a job to get it. I will ask my dad (which is a GREAT soldering person) to consult with him about what to do. Maybe he can fix it

 

[bluekatt]

that pictur elink isnt working btw and is the emac now dead in the water or stil running ?

more thermal paste or at least higher grade might work

 

[MacJunky]

more thermal paste or at least higher grade might work

8-o Not more! If anything you want less. Thermal compound is only intended to fill tiny gaps and other surface inconsistencies, not drown your CPU.