Reading Time: 4 minutes This is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. As the 2023 PPC Challenge is well underway, it was time for Maya to make an appearance again. As we’re used to from these machines (once the power supply has been fixed), it fired right up. This year I want to play with some of the cool projects out there such as Arctic Fox, Message Bridge, Discord Lite, and others….
Reading Time: 3 minutes This project is a work in progress but I thought I’d share what I have so far. I finally set out to map the capacitors in an MDD PSU so that we can see about recapping it. Currently on my desk is a Samsung PSCF401601B(C) Rev: A & Rev: B 360W power supply. This came from a FW800 MDD and is a revised model, Apple shipped the first MDD’s with a 400W power supply that ran hot and was super…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Day 4 of the Classic Mac OS Challenge went very smooth. The new hard drive is performing as expected and the iMac is finally behaving as it should. I spent most of my time working on my website and might even make this my default web work rig! Wow does Dreamweaver MX run smooth!! Dreamweaver MX is not the bloatware that today’s Dreamweaver is and you can tell by how fast it runs, pulling up massive pages in a split…
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is a continuation of “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 1 – Preparations” and “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 2 – Recap and test” so read that first if you haven’t already I didn’t want to squeeze this into the previous articles and clutter them up, so here are some additional notes. First off, here is the pinout for the January 2005 G5 Xserve and G5 Xserve Cluster Node PSU: This is looking at…
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is a continuation of “Recapping an Xserve G5 power supply – Part 1 – Preparations” so read that first if you haven’t already 🙂 Received some capacitors today! (Most up to date parts list available in Part 3, the list that follows is old and links may be broken) I put them all in place (not soldered) to see if I got the right sizes and here is the conclusion: 1. C111 – 1000uF, 16V – Perfect fit 2….
Reading Time: 5 minutes A few weeks ago I picked up a whole stack of Xserves. I had been looking for a first gen G4 Xserve which has the tray load optical drive instead of the slot load and the rest of them were believed to be all G5’s. Never having had a Cluster Node model either, I was happy to see 8 of them in the stack. The purpose of this was to make some cool videos for my YouTube channel. When I…
Reading Time: 7 minutes Once in a while I take on a project that involves something I’ve never done before. This time it is the revival and overclocking of a Power Mac G4 (MDD) dual 1.25GHz CPU card. This card was working fine until someone decided to take the world’s biggest soldering iron to it in an attempt to overclock it to 1.5GHz. Just like making a sandwich with an excavator, this was doomed to fail. The card fried, pads and traces burned right…
Reading Time: 8 minutes This is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. You may recall me writing “Project Maya, named so by my son when I asked him what a fun codename would be, is the restoration, rebuilding and upgrading of a 2002 Power Mac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors. This is the first generation so doesn’t have FireWire 800. I wanted a 2002 model specifically because it is the last model to…
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. No, I didn’t mess up and accidentally named this post the same as the previous one. And no, you’re not seeing double. I am upgrading the graphics card yet again. The ATI Radeon 9600 performs really well, handling the games I play without issue but it being a card designed for the G5, it simply doesn’t get enough airflow in…
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. This MDD being a gaming machine, the stock ATI Radeon 9000 with 64MB of VRAM was not cutting it. Sure, games would run fine but with settings way down, and even then I often dipped below 10fps. It’s very hard to shoot people at 10fps or less. I needed something a little better so the search began. A few good…