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Overclocking Your iBook to 600MHz
Cryptnotic writes: "The guys at Accelerate Your Mac have
figured out how to modify the motherboard on the recent Apple iBooks to get them to run at 600MHz with a 100MHz bus speed. There are
benchmarks comparing the OC'd iBook to some regular Apple desktop machines. However, what I am wondering most is how this overclocked G3 compares to the much more expensive Apple G4 Powerbook and if it makes it worth voiding the warranty." Remember, not recommended for your iBook.
Try actually reading the article. The author talks about battery life at the end of the article.
The G3 has been around for ages. It has long been suspected that the speeds chosen for use in iMac and iBooks are conditioned more my marketing factors then technological limitations, particularly the 66mhz system bus. Basically, IBM can clock them faster the Motorola can clock G4s, but it is unacceptable to have a faster chip in the cheaper machines (Altivec excepted).
The 3-5 degree raise in temperature seems entirely within the engineering limitations of the machine and I have to say that this mod looks very enticing indeed.
Someone finaly makes the iBook better, and what happens, the new iBooks are getting ready to be released... http://www.macosrumors.com/
place my TiPowerbook (G4 500MHz) on your lap for a three hour flight and you'll get your answer.
though the head is ambient on the powerbooks, since that;s one of the benifets of the titanium shell. I've had it running for days on AC and though it was very warm, it never effected stability.
from what i understand G3s and G4s lend themselves to overclocking quite well. I once had a Apple salesman tell me not to midrange macs since the cheapos can be overclocked so easily, but that was before a while ago, just before the first AltaVex G4s hit the shops so ?...
As the referenced article said, it reduces battery life by 15-30 minutes. This should leave you with a realistic battery life of about 3.5 to 4 hours. My own experience is that an unmodified iBook is good for over 4 hours of editing text.
The change to battery life isn't large for two reasons. Firstly the PowerPC has dynamic power management, which makes idle time cheap. Secondly, a lot of the power consumption comes from the disk and display, which are unchanged by this mod.
i just got a g4-powerbook last week (my very first mac, and first notebook computer) i was looking at the ibook seriously until i actually looked at it, sat down and played with it for a while. The deciding factor for me wasn't speed, it was the screen! the ibook is just too small, and the screen is huge on the g4. (okay its pretty fast too) but compared to my desktop 1ghz athalon i'd say its pretty comparable. was it worth the extra 700 bucks? hell yeah. i'll have this g4 for a long-ass time.
I got an airport card and a cheap-o linksys base station and i can post from the crapper now! im serious! i can sit and take a 5 hour crap while posting to slashdot on one battery! this was a minor selling point for me, but a selling point nevertheless.
ps. i'm not pooping as i type this...
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Another note: It's impossible to open the case without making ugly marks. You need at least three hands and several thin but nonflexible steel blades. Having done it twice (once for modding and once for demodding), I'm considering opening it once more in order to file down the ugly edges -- and repaint the inside in ultramarine blue. :-)
The only positive thing is that I now know how to replace the optical drive and hard disk. 10GB doesn't really cut it nowadays... I would really like one of those 48GB drives.
That's my 0.02 euro. And... if someone actually succeeds in performing the 600/350 mod, please let me know exactly what resistors you moved. :) Pleeeease!
--Bud
We need a new mod score "-1, Lazy Fuckwit".
Yes, yes, the irony that this is -1 Flamebait / Offtopic / Overrated isn't missed on me. Mod me, I am full of love.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...will be a G4. The iBook is a good machine, don't get me wrong. A buddy of mine just bought it for a cheap OS X machine. When I have the $$ to spend on a new machine, I'll first get a kicking G4 desktop and then get a G4 laptop or better (might have the G5 by that time). Why buy something that's not the latest greatest? I've always had this theory on buying computers (it works better on people mostly unlike us that can't upgrade their own computer). Buy the most RAM you can afford, even if the quantity seems very unreasonable at the time because you'll need it down the road. Buy the fastest machine you can afford (or get the one just out of your budget and wait a month to save up the extra $$ to get it) because it would be the fastest for long. That little bit of speed down the road may be a lot in your mind and make you feel better about your purchase. That said, an iBook is a good machine. It wouldn't be my first pick but it's still a damned good machine. I thought the Cube was too. Guess it didn't make the cuts. My $.02.
you should never use a mutimeter to test resistenc ein a circuit. 2 reasons for this are you are not mesearing the resistence of the resister you are mesauring the resistence of the hole circuit the resister is in. second reason multimeters in the ohms setting puts out a current to do the measuring and depending on what you tuch you could possibly fry something
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Anyone going apple with be into media. And unless you are encoding media, which I doubt you will be donig with an iBook, you will not need mode CPU power. They are powerful enough. (But when is enough enough... search me.)
Mostly the big bottleneck on iBooks would be bus, memory and HD throughput, since it's primary use is still MM playback. And most games rely more and more on the GFX card's processing power.
The final and most important problem is heat generation on a notebook, leading to other problems like short battery life. Once again these are not good traits for that applications that this iBook excels at.
Rather chuck a couple of Durons in a SMP PC.
My 0.02
This was better than your typical 'i changed a few settings in my BIOS' article, although I'm not sure how much I trust [most] macintosh users with a soldering iron on a laptop motherboard.. As for
the people saying it doesn't make much difference,
it really does when you consider that you're bumping it up on both the bus and the actual cpu speed.. *slurp*
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
I see in the article they are changing the spec of the CPU from 7.5x66.6MHz (500MHz) to 6.0x100MHz(600MHz). How about leaving the multiplier the same? Will the iBook run at 750MHz? How about 650 or 700MHz?
This mod's been out there for quite some time, long enough for others to have performed it. As the one poster said, It didn't work for him. I've been looking on some forums (can't remember which, macworld??) but a few others have tried this, one initially had success but it was unstable sometimes, one didn't have success at all. But according to both you can still change the bus speed to 100Mhz, you'll have to switch the multiplier down to 5. Never the less the instructions are correct!
I've been looking into this because I've been wanting an ibook myself, I want to play with OSX.
For another poster that mentioned the heat issue, this is also in the article. Turns out he added a thin aluminum plate and made it cooler than before.
madcowherd
You know, if you overclock the all-metal PowerBook G4 to a fast enough speed, put a piece of cheese in between two pieces of bread, and slam it shut between the lid and the handrests for about 5 minutes, you could make a really awesome grilled cheese sandwich.
a friendly reminder: the g4 is just a g3 with an altivec 128-but vector processing unit. afaik there are no further differences.
Except for the FPU unit which is almost 1.5 times faster.
And the fact that the backsidecache controller on the G3 can only adress about 1 mbyte of level 2 cache while the G4 can adress up to 2 mbyte of level 2 cache.
Technically the core of the G3 was based on the PPC603ev while the core of the G4 is based on the PPC604e.
The article on xlr8yourmac.com is quite old, so I am quite surprise about the big fuzz that it generates today on '/.'.
;-)
I applied the mod about a month ago, when I decided to invest into a decent and not too expensive Linux laptop. I was quite happy with the speed of the machine, but heard from a friend of mine who knew someone at Apple who told her that the machine was originally designed for 100MHz mem bus. The only thing that required Apple to move back to 66MHz was to be able to give the machine a four hour battery run as the marketing brochures showing these figures were already printing when the tests were being ran (!)
With this in mind, I just overclocked the memory bus of the machine, because I believe that it is the main bottleneck for my application of the iBook: basically watching a DVD, playing MP3 files with iTunes (great player by the way) and being able to type a report for my boss at the same time. Yes, I can do that, but the laptop had some troubles keeping up
There are a few catches though. Part of the RAM is located on the motherboard (64MB or 128MB depending on the model you get) and the memory controller would need to be reprogrammed in theory. Not doing so can will cause some RAM not to function properly and that could be the reason for the mod not to succeed. The other problem is having the speed bus directly encoded in the OpenFirmware ROM (kinda like a BIOS thing on PC.) You can patch the value by adding an extra Forth patch in non-volatile RAM, so it's ok. This is required for some OS to calibrate properly. In my case, that didn't matter because the CPU bus was the same.
Doing this mod, I ended up using the same number of resistors. I just add to move them around. If you go for another config and end up using less resistors, keep them in a safe place as you never know what is going to happen (some people want to purchase only genuine speed laptops, so you may want to revert the mod if you sell your laptop in the future.)
I didn't add the extra metal plate as it is described in the article, because I didn't want to create to much pressure on the components or get a bended keyboard (which would have made the keys touch the screen as on the TiBook.) I just added some clear heatsink paste (the one that doesn't get messy.) I never had a heat problem with this machine, before or after the mod, even under Linux. Linux kernel is not really energy savvy on the PowerPC at this time (some bugs and lots of hacks to get the fastest context switch doesn't goes along with good energy saving.)
The last point I want to cover, is that you need to make sure you are really careful about disassembling and reassembling the unit. Aesthetic is a big thing on this particular brand of machines, so don't mess with it. I used a soft flat spoon (the kind you can find at your supermarket for mixing stuff with soft flat edges) to lever the side of the machine. I also used surgeon gloves during the all operation (no pun) and worked in the kitchen area the only place without carpet in my house. I touched the fridge before putting the gloves to make sure I didn't carry any static. You are never too careful and because this mod voids the warranty you may want to think again before going for it.
-- PPA
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Not true. The G4 also implements MERSI, instead of just MEI in the G3, making it more capable in supporting multi-processor configurations.
It also has some internal bus and FP improvements, but they're overshadowed by AltiVec and MERSI.
A quick Google search on "powerpc g4 specs" turned up this page: www.macevolution.com/g4/g4.shtml.
DID NOT SUCCEED.
Steve, Steve, Steve, I've told you before: you do the marketing. Have Woz do this stuff for you, mmm'k?
The G4 has a better FPU unit, as well as the altivec, more cache, and a few other things I can't remember at the moment. It definetly ISN'T a "G3 with altivec"
9.81 m/s^2 seems to be taught to less people, though its supposedly closer to the true acceleration due to gravity. Did you take non-engineering physics?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I don't know this out of direct expereince, but a fried of mine who has a lot of experience disassembling machines says that it takes a very long time to disassemble the new (2001) iBooks. One site says it takes three hours to do this.
Since I don't have one, I can't verify this. But it may be worth thinking about if you want to speed up the CPU.
-- haaz, who has two pretty-easy-to-disassemble (Wall St.) PowerBook G3s.
-- haaz.
The iBooks performance is not *that* bad. I knwo from experience that you most likely have a very small amount of RAM and that is where you true complaints come from. The iBooks do *not* get *that* hot, so I am also wondering where you complaints about that particular situation are truly stemming from. A couple of cheap Durons and an MP motherboard to support those chips, along with the new case/power supply you are going to have to purchase along with the DDR RAM for the MB is *not* going to be cheap whatsoever, especially in your country. Plus add your DVD drive, and DVD decoder card, plus the proper Video Card to your *cheap* PC and you have just successfully spent a ton of money, especially in your country.
The iBook is a beautiful machine, with the Powerbook being the pinnacle of laptops. If you do not wish to purchase an Apple product, then don't post comments dismissing Apple because you purchased a cheap, underpowered version of an iBook and then post complaints about it. I know personally that my iBook runs *exceptionally* well for all of my needs, including gaming. Yeah, it does not carry a mobile version of the nVidia G-Force or ATI Radeon chipsets (yet) but if you are truly, and I mean *truly* interested in FPS, then why are you using a laptop anyways? Go and buy yourself a dual PPC Apple desktop and throw a G-Force card in it. Load OSX and have yourself a Quake party. But, don't just go around posting and bitching, please when your intended uses for a machine apparently are more than what you purchased. Apple iBook are beautiful machines and as of yet, my iBook has never, ever caused me any problems, inculding heat, power usage, graphics performance, or any other such problem you and other bitch about constantly.
Why stop there? If you're certain that you're going to buy nothing buy the best when you eventually get some money, why not figure on getting a ruggedized P4 laptop with one of those phat 1600x1280 displays? I'm sure you can get one for about $7000. And maybe for your desktop you should get a Sun 450 with 4 processors for $30,000 or so.
Some of us have to live in the here and now and actually buy things we can afford. And a well-equipped iBook sells for over $1200 less than a similarly equipped and warrantied Powerbook G4. Yep, a G3 is a good 35% slower than a G4 for heavy Photoshop lifting, and yeah, an iBook can't drive two monitors--or even one high-res one. But if you don't need those things, spending an amount that can cover a mortgage payment or 4 car payments or a 5-day Caribbean vacation for two's worth of money on a "phatter" laptop comes down to personal choice.
A lot of graphics and video professionals need the power of a G4 laptop, and some don't have the luxury of getting both a desktop and a laptop. But an extra $1200 simply for the "cool toy" factor of a laptop that will likely be dead or useless in 3 years or less? Count me out.
Now that all the necessary screws on the bottom have been removed, set the iBook bottom (exposed motherboard) down on a anti static surface (I used a large motherboard anti static bag).
Um, I'm sorry, but an anti-static BAG is NOT an anti-static surface. The bag is only anti-static when something is placed within it and the bag is sealed. This is a concept known as a Faraday Cage[1]. Placing a component on TOP of an anti-static bag does absolutely nothing.
I've been guilty of the same thing myself, I hardly ever use any type of grounding/anti-static devices when handling my stuff. But that's me, when playing with my OWN equipment. When you publish a review telling people how to take their computers apart, and then don't use the proper precautions, that's just negligent.
[1] - A device that is a conductive enclosure that terminates anelectric field on the exterior so that no field exists on the inside of the enclosure.
der dee der.
Your friend bought cheap no-name RAM, and the supplier lied about its compatibility with the Mac. Most suppliers were honest enough to replace affected RAM.
No, the RAM wasn't "destroyed," it simply won't work in that machine.
Does he know he has an idiot for a friend?NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Did it occur to anyone that perhaps the reason why it gets better fpu performance... you mean flops, is because of Altivec? It doesn't really matter because they all suck on Linux.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
First off, let me praise Apple for getting much, much better about their
hardware pricing and getting more competitive. The lower end iBook
delivers a decent package for something like $1299 US. There are some
serious challenges that face Apple, and most of it comes from not licensing
their hardware platform. That argument has been rehashed a million times
but here are some ways that has hurt them with the iBook.
vendors out there, there really is a Laptop for everyone- you just have to do
a lot of research.
to deliver 6 different levels of laptops. The cheapest is right now
$1299 I think, with the more expensive being close to $3300.
parts like memory, drives, displays and the like and have far less or no
competition from generics. Also, some manufacturers have built names
like value and reliability based on their previous models, helping to justify
higher (profits) consumer prices.
just the right spot in what consumers are looking for in a laptop.
PC Laptop makers use more of a 'shotgun effect' to get all of them.
I went shopping about a month ago and found the iBooks. I was pleased
with built-in Airport abilities, along with dual USB and fire wire built in.
I was attracted by the initial $1299 laptop, and started looking at the nicer
models. I ended up getting the DVD/CDRW combo and grabbing the Airport
Card and 256M or RAM. The problem came in that the laptop just didn't
perform that well. Everyone I talked to about it said the Titanium's were
better CPU performers, but had problems wit Airport cards, etc. OSX and
the fiasco surrounding the upgrade path to OSX 10.1 left me quite frustrated.
Jobs said 10.1 would be out in September 2001, and announced the final release
date on or around the 23rd and held the retailers from releasing it until the
29th. Somewhere he seemed to forget how eager everyone was, and when
criticized about the release date he basically said "the 29th is still
September".
To cut this babble short, Apple seems to have sacrificed some serious quality
issues with OSX's performance on current hardware. As much as the Slashdot
readership might not like it, maybe Apple could learn from Microsoft, whose
current releases have worked great on current hardware since Windows 3.1.
In other words, Apple sold me a laptop that crawled with the OS they released.
I was so disappointed I sold the iBook on EBay for $50 less that I paid for all
the parts and bought a 700Mhz Dell with 256Mhz of RAM, a 20 Gig drive, and a 32
Meg GeForce 2 video card and DVD Rom drive (a refurbished laptop) for $300
less than the iBook.
Apple has good products, but they need to focus more on business that on
aesthetics.
Suddenly a more acceptable reason to say:
I have a strange burning sensation in my crotch...
--
Josh
I have a couple of laptops and probably would never overclock them even if I can. I am more interested in battery battery hours.
kawai
your g3 turns into apple-sauce
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
It's weird. I was going through the same mental debate as yourself (purchasing iBook or Ti), and I ended up with the iBook. The deciding factor?
The screen.
For me the iBook screen is brighter and clearer, while the Ti screen is bigger, it appears to be a little on the washed out side. The iBook's small footprint also helped.
But hell, years down the road I'll probably get the Ti.
// Jay
As a former Apple authorized service technician, I'd like to point out that while the warnings and such are nice (and an article that includes soldering wouldn't seem complete without it), you'd be hard pressed to find any authorized service center that would even notice the solders he was making.
Apple system repairs are done at the module level (one of the reasons it is so expensive) -- if the system doesn't start up, and you've got power from the a/c adapter, you're going to get a new logic board (unless they are doing whole-unit replacement, which is fairly common nowadays). In anycase, nobody is peering over your logic board to see that resistor R237 has been incorrectly connected to R233. The new one comes in, the old one goes in a static bag, and back to Apple via Airborne.
Not to say it won't happen that you'll get "caught" -- but it's pretty damned unlikely.
It's impossible to say "this processor is x amount better than that processor" in Apple machines. They've used a total of about 6 or 7 variants throughout the years. Lemme go through them.
Motorola PPC 750 - first G3 processor. Integer performance is 20% better than the PPC 604e. fpu performance is 5% worse.
I think there was a PPC 760. Low power version of the 750.
IBM 750CX - IBM's G3 processor. 256k onchip L2 cache. That's pretty much all I know about it. I think there's a CXe version, but I know nothing of it.
Motorola PPC 7400 - first G4. fpu was improved a bit from Motorola PPC 750 as well as first processor to have altivec.
PPC 7410 - low power version of the 7400. This is what's in Tibooks.
PPC 7440 - Low power version of the PPC 7450. Not in any of Apple's computers (yet).
PPC 7450 - increased pipeline from 4 stages to 7. 256k on-chip L2 cache. Support for up to 2 megs of L3 cache. Added integer and altivec units. Altivec can now processor 2 instructions at the same time. The design is expected to top out at 1ghz.
PPC 8500 - originally called the PPC 7500, but changed for probably marketing reasons. This is the G5. First total revamp of the PPC processor design since it was first introduced in 1994. 64 bit processor with full 32 bit compadibility at full speed. Rumor has it that they're pretty stable at 1.2ghz and up until you reach 2ghz. Another rumor is that the design is expected to top out at 4-5ghz.
As far as performance, the 750 and 7400 are almost dead even if altivec is not in use.
IBM's G3 and the PPC 7450 are for the most part dead even in practice, but if things were optimized for the 7450 it would be 1.5x faster. I think the 750CX does integers 20% faster than the 7450. This is assuming that altivec is not in use.
If whatever you're doing does use altivec, the G4 wins everytime. it really depends on what you're doing that determines how much of a speedbump you get. The lowest number I've seen is a 40% speed increase. That number can be drastically higher. Some technical document of altivec showed that a single instruction put through it went 10x faster. Not that it does much for real world performance, but it does show altivec's potential.
In MacOS 9 and older, nothing really used Altivec, so you wouldn't see too much of a difference between a G3 and a G4. There's less than 20 apps that use it. In OS 9, there is hardly any difference in speed from my 300mhz G3 and my friend's dual 450 simply because OS 9 doesn't really take advantage of altivec nor dual processors.
In MacOS X you will see a very noticeable difference because it uses altivec a lot. I don't have it, so I can't really comment on the speed of it personally, but from what other people are saying, it's highly recommended that you have a G4.
Yes. Except if you are running OS X 10.1, because Apple felt there wasn't enough demand (read: they had too many other things to do and wanted to get 10.1 out the door...). But there are a bunch of articles on how to make it work on the mac web sites like macfixit.com.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
128-but VPU? Don't belive I've heard of one of them before.
Woudn't be related to this would it?
Just because you do not own a Macintosh computer and are sitting at home on your Boeing (which is a loud obnoxious Pentium II PC for all those out there that are clueless) don't complain about Macintosh hardware. Macintosh hardware is the most stable and for your information, TedCheshireAcad, OS 10.1 runs very fast, DVD playing is extremely responsive. So umm yeah go and sit on your Linux box that has no supported software.
Mod +1:Interesting.
The lovely Flame12 is new to the whole Slashdot thing, and I think we should start her off with a little bit of Karma?
I would like to get an iBook, but I need to test web sites on Windows. Does anyone know if it there is any way to run/emulate Windows on an iBook?
To be completely honest, I don't see how an overclocked Tibook would be usable. The keyboard at that corner would likely melt from the excessive heat. You wouldn't have to worry about the warranty, you'd have to be sure to carry a fire extinguisher along with your notebook!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Sure you have, it's the newest creation of that wacky South Park scientist... just like his monkey with 4 asses!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There are some serious challenges that face Apple, and most of it comes from not licensing
their hardware platform.
Whether that is true or not is up for discussion, but the fact is licensing the hardware would (and did) create a whole slew of new problems. Apple and the Mac are both in far better strategic position today than they were when the cloners where around.
Yes, IBM allowed clones, and everybody lived happily ever after. That doesn't mean that this can be applied to other platforms with guaranteed success. In fact, the hardware/software integration is one of the key differentiating factors between x86 and Macs. This has a number of advantages, virtually all relating directly to user experience.
Apple seems to have sacrificed some serious quality issues with OSX's performance on current hardware.
This hasn't been my experience. OS X 10.1 zips right along on my sister's iBook G3/500 w/ 128MB. 10.0.4 did not provide satisfactory performance on the same hardware, mainly due to swapping. Have you actually run 10.1 on the iBook, or only 10.0.x?
the parts and bought a 700Mhz Dell with 256Mhz of RAM, a 20 Gig drive, and a 32
Meg GeForce 2 video card and DVD Rom drive (a refurbished laptop) for $300
less than the iBook
Dell and Apple have totally different business models. Dell mainly assembles parts and sells at low margins. They don't really develop products in the same sense that Apple does. If Apple adopted Dell's business model, there would be no Mac OS X, no iMovie, no FireWire, no Darwin, etc.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
and their very own "Megahertz Myth" argument, this mod should have no bearing on performance.
They never said megahertz has no bearing on performance. They simply said that clock rate can not be used as the only means to compare performance of chips of different processor families.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I've just finished putting my iBook back together and am pleased to report that it's running very nicely indeed at 600Mhz w/100Mhz system bus. The components were smaller than I expected and even after trying hard to keep track of the screws I still have 2 leftovers.. oh and the battery's foot that I pried off before I realised only 3 of the feet were hiding screws. I'm installing 10.1 and Photoshop 6.0.1 which I won today at a 10.1 launch BBQ here in Sydney :P