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For all you MDD fans...

Oh, man.......

I'm so tempted to grab a complete system... $100-ish shipped. (Although that's without vid card or HD trays even. I can live without the vid card, I can even do without the drives themselves, but he wants $45 per HD tray.)

 
If I were to get one of them, I'd skip the trays and hard-mount some high capacity SATA drives with SATA to IDE adapters. You could have 8 terabytes of storage for $600 USD.

 
A 1.33 DP G4 Xserve just went on eBay for $212 + shipping. 1.33 DP G4, 2 GB Ram, 4 drive trays with a 400 GB drive in each tray, with OS X server installed. The trays and drives alone are worth that price!! A great deal for someone, unfortunately not me.

 
Can the processor in these things be used in any other machine? Or are the soldered to the logic board, or on a different form of daughter card?

The thread subject implies they would work in MDDs...

 
Yes, the CPU cards from the MDD machines and the Xserves are interchangeable. They're on a daughtercard just like the older G4s, but with a 167 MHz bus which talks to DDR memory. Of course, you wouldn't be able to put the top on an Xserve if you put in a MDD CPU card with the heat sink, but an Xserve processor module would fit just fine in a MDD.

The MDD and the Xserve are the only machines with CPU modules which run the bus at 167 MHz. Sonnet sells an upgrade which will work in either.

Note that the original 1 GHz Xserve and the original 867 MHz MDD had 133 MHz busses; all others had 167 MHz busses.

 
I have the Sonnet MDD upgrade and yes, it'll work in Xserves or MDDs. The connector is very strange and I was really worried I'd bend all those pins putting it in.

 
I felt the same way when I put the processor card in my MDD, but there is really only one way to put it in. If one tries to insert it any other way you can't make contact with the pins in order to bend them.

 
Thanks guys. Any idea how the CPUs used to populate the Xserve dual 1.3 GHz differ (or are the same) as the ones in the dual (and single) 1.25 GHz MDD?

I doubt it's worth the trouble to upgrade a dual 1.25 GHz MDD, but I might put a dual module in the single 1.25 GHz MDD I've got here.

But there are all those variations in on-chip cache and on-CPU module cache, and then the question of whether the 1.3 GHz chips might be more overclockable than the 1.25 GHz, or perhaps were built on the same die and so are essentially already overclocked 1.25 GHz G4s....

Okay, I got a clue and went and checked everymac.com.

The single and dual 1.25 GHz G4 MDDs are built with PPC7455s which have a 256K on-chip L2 cache. The single has a 2 MB external L3 cache. The dual has 2 MB external L3 cache, but I can't tell if that's per CPU or total.

The Xserve DP G4 appears to have the same CPU/cache arrangement, so that just leaves the question of whether the 1.33 GHz 7455 in the Xserve is more upgradable or just a higher speed binning of the same die as the 1.25 GHz.

 
But there are all those variations in on-chip cache and on-CPU module cache, and then the question of whether the 1.3 GHz chips might be more overclockable than the 1.25 GHz, or perhaps were built on the same die and so are essentially already overclocked 1.25 GHz G4s....
Click to expand...
They're essentially the same. All of the CPUs from the 667 MHz and up have 256k of L2 and at least 1 meg of L3 cache until you get to 7447 G4s, although there was a 733 MHz QuickSilver model with 256k of L2 and no L3.

As far as I know, all Apple 167 MHz CPU cards have 2 meg of L3 cache and 256k of L2 per CPU, and the Sonnet has 512k of L2 and no L3.

 
I've got a single processor 1.25 ghz, 167 bus that only has 1mb of L3 cache. It was one of the OS9 bootable MDDs that came out just before the G5.

 
Are these hackable to work on the QS and older machines, or are they strictly MDD/XServe only?

 
Okay, it may have been foolish of me...

But I just bought one that was for sale, As Is, with no RAM, but it does include the video card and a drive tray. It was about $5 - $15 cheaper than the ones of which there are a bunch, when shipping is considered (lower price, higher shipping).

The seller is called Asset Recovery mumble, and they say it powers up but produces no video. But they also say there's no RAM. What are the chances that they got the box the way it is, with no RAM, and just plug it in and report the results?

Taking that chance wasn't worth it for the $5 savings, but it may have been to have the video card and drive tray. The $79 + $40 deals have no video card nor drive tray.

 
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