Upgrading my G4 MDD with a SONNET Encore/Crescendo MDX G4 Duet 1.8GHz Dual CPU Upgrade

[Phipli]

Even in the 8600 I was testing last night, Norton System Info was managing 30MB/s read and write with a SIL3112 card. Remembering that fast SCSI was theoretically 10MB/s, but good luck finding a disk that gets close to that.

 

[Irinikus]

Here's the Schematic for the AcBel Power Supply that's in My machine: (The Power Supplies in MDD's are prone to failure due to bad caps. So it will be a wise move to re-cap my system's power supply.)



Here's list of capacitors required to re-cap the AcBel MDD Power Supply:



I don't want do go the way of the ATX Power Supply mod in this machine!

 

[Irinikus]

There's a bit of goop, but these units appear to be relatively service friendly:

 

[Irinikus]

I installed the SSD into the system today:







It took 1 hour and 10 minutes to copy across 50.91GB!





Here's the new drive speed test result:



It's a significant improvement over the original mechanical drive: (Especially in the random read and write department!)

 

[herd]

I also have this Firewire 800 Dual 1.42GHz machine which I'll have to put up against the Dual 1.8GHz at some point...

I'd be interested in seeing your results. Those are nice computers; thanks for posting about them!

 

[Irinikus]

Today I got OS9.2 onto the MDD Machine, which uses a Radeon 9200 Mac Edition for its display. (The machine now has both the 9800 Pro and 9200 PCI Mac Editions installed!)





Because the MDD has the SONNET installed, I couldn't install OS9 directly onto it, as it needs a special driver to work with the SONNET, which needs to be installed before the SONNET's installed into the system.

In order to get OS9 onto a disk with the necessary SONNET and ATI drivers installed, I turned to my QuickSilver, as it's not upgraded as yet:



This is what the MDD looks like inside now: (It's pretty much as MAXED out as it can possibly be)





The reason why the 9200's installed is because OS9 doesn't work with the 9800 Pro, and the 9200's the absolute best card I can fit into the machine which supports OS9 and runs together with the 9800 Pro in the machine.

So it's the 9800 Pro for OSX and the 9200 for OS9.2

 

[Irinikus]

I'd be interested in seeing your results. Those are nice computers; thanks for posting about them!

Thanks! It's a pleasure!