Just purchased a PowerMac MDD single 1GHz system and wondered what the fastest I can make it. Is there some 1.8ghz upgrade for the MDD Macs?

How easy of an upgrade is it?

Tom

> Just purchased a PowerMac MDD single 1GHz system and wondered what
> the fastest I can make it. Is there some 1.8ghz upgrade for the MDD Macs?

Yes, for the MDD Macs there is one CPU card model at 1.8 GHz (also available at 1.6 GHz) from one manufacturer. For more info see:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6910&forum=11&start=4
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7135&forum=11&start=60
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7332&forum=11&start=81
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7332&forum=11&start=88
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7638&forum=3&start=18

> How easy of an upgrade is it?

Judging from what others who installed such upgrade wrote it seems to be very easy, if you can find such a card in the first place that is.

CPU upgrade cards for MDD Power Mac seem to be very, very rare.

CPU upgrade cards are quite common in AGP Power Mac (Digital Audio, Quicksilver etc)

The fastest would probably be a MDD with 1.8Ghz upgrade card, but good luck finding one. I've been actively looking for months and finally gave up.

How about the dual 1.4ghz upgrade? How easy and available are they? Tj

I just recently upgraded my dual 1.25GHz G4 to dual 1.42GHz G4's in my MDD PowerMac and it was very simple.

If you are only going to run MorphOS and no other OSes on your G4 PowerMac, I would suggest that you get a single 1.25GHz G4 stock Apple CPU board for your MDD and leave it stock, or over-clock it to 1.4Ghz, or possibly 1.5GHz. With just one G4 CPU, it will be easier to keep it cool.

a 1.25ghz overclock to 1.42ghz would be indeed the cheapest solution for running MorphOS fast with an MDD.

Is there a guide on how to do that anywhere?

@Macsociety:
Afaik, your MDD (it's a FW 800 single 1ghz cpu, is it?) can be overclocked via openfirmware:
http://aquamac.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=talk&action=display&thread=145
More instructions here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-12615.html
Though, it's possible to overclock the 133 mhz frontside bus via solder&jumpers and then doing the same on the daughter card (but I've found no scheme or whatelse for overclocking cpu, though I think are the same for the single 1.25 cpu).
Overclocking the single 1.25 cpu is quite easy but can create problems. I did it with the 1.5 overclock and after a first succesfully boot in OS X and a failure trying to boot MorphOS I managed only kernel panics trying to boot again...
Btw, here you are the overclocking instructions for a single 1.25 cpu:
http://www.mactalk.com.au/10/49293-overclocking-powermac-mdd.html
Read with care, as L3 cache could suffer from this overclock (maybe the cause of kernel panics?!?) as explained in the thread.

Thanks Jambalah,
I'm thinking of purchasing an 867MHz MDD and installing an Xserve 1.33 GHz processor card.
Without those instructions, the Xserve processor card would only run at 1GHz.

Very useful information.

@Jambalah

Thanks for the overclocking links. I've done some FSB overclocking at my spare Quicksilver, and although it runs stable, I can't see any difference regarding speed.

Interesting topic.

But I have some questions:

1. Does a dual CPU machine affects the performance of MorphOS, I think only one CPU is used. Can this be confirmed?

2. So I guess a G4 machine with the 1.8 Ghz card upgrade is the fastest solution so far?

Quote:

Was this done via OpenFirmware? IS the method described to the links above -for a dual machine-, I will take a look but can you give some more info anyway?

1. MorphOS only uses one CPU.

2. The upgrade I did was to replace the dual 1.25GHz G4 CPU daughter card with a stock Apple dual 1.42GHz G4 CPU daughter card. Unplug one and replace with the other (as the bus speed for the dual 1.25GHz and dual 1.42GHz G4's are the same).

> I guess a G4 machine with the 1.8 Ghz card upgrade is the fastest solution so far?

Looking at CPU speed alone there're also 2.0 GHz upgrades for pre-MDD machines.