G4 Cube mods

2014-11-02 20:17:43 -08:00

As some of you are aware, I own a Power Mac G4 Cube.

The G4 Cube was an impressive little machine from 2001. It was a Power Mac G4, minus any PCI slots, packed into an 8-inch by 8-inch by 8-inch (plus a few inches’ clearance underneath) cube. And it had no fan—it was cooled entirely by convection through the mostly-empty center column.

It’s also really fun to upgrade.

I’ve upgraded my Cube in three ways:

RAM

One of the old stand-bys, along with upgrading the processor and video card (both of which remain stock in my Cube).

RAM for a Cube is dirt cheap now, so I bought 1 GB. The theoretical maximum is 1.5 GB, but I’m only running Mac OS 9 on my Cube (all my personal OS X usage happens on my MacBook Air), so 1 GB should already be overkill.

SSD

The Cube, of course, came with a spinning-disk drive (a.k.a. “hard disk drive” or HDD), connected via ATA.

Replacing an HDD with an SSD is straightforward in most newer computers, but the Cube presents special challenges.

For one thing, it’s a desktop computer with a 3.5-inch drive bay, and SSDs are typically 2.5-inch (the “laptop” form factor). This would not be a problem if it were the only one, because adapter brackets exist, but it’s not the only problem.

Problem #2 is that the Cube uses ATA (now known as “parallel ATA” or PATA), whereas SSDs use serial ATA (a.k.a. SATA). Again, adapters exist, but that brings us to problem #3:

Space.

Not disk space, but physical space.

As I mentioned, the Cube is a lot of electronics packed into a small volume. The drive bay does not have free space on any side of it; it is exactly as big as needed to fit a 3.5-inch ATA hard disk drive.

This makes it difficult to impossible to fit a 2.5-inch drive, a PATA-to-SATA adapter, and an adapter bracket.

OWC sells SSDs with integrated adapters for pretty much exactly this purpose, but I cheaped out and went the DIY route.

  • I bought an 80 GB SSD off Woot.
  • I bought an adapter board at Fry’s. I think it was this one, but it was months ago and I’m not about to open up my Cube again to find out.
  • I bought an adapter bracket, I think from Amazon, but didn’t end up using it because of the aforementioned space constraints.

With a HDD, leaving everything flopping around inside the computer would be just asking for a problem, because the HDD has a motor, which will cause it and everything connected to it to vibrate. Sooner or later, the HDD could come unplugged (especially if it’s a 2.5-inch HDD), and then you just have bits pouring out all over whatever the Cube is sitting on.

But this isn’t an HDD; it’s an SSD. A Solid-State Drive.

It has no moving parts.

That’s what’s cool about having an SSD in a Cube:

No moving parts at all.

The Cube has no fan. The video card has no fan. The SSD has no motor. Thus, the entire set-up is completely silent.

The one downside is that since this drive is so large (by 2001 standards), the Mac takes awhile to validate that it is actually properly formatted. It actually shows the blinking question mark for a minute or two before it finally boots.

HDMI

The stock video card in my Cube is a Rage 128 with ADC and VGA outputs.

I used to use my Cube on a contemporary Apple Studio Display that I could plug into the ADC port, but I don’t want to set up a second monitor specifically for that computer.

For sound, the Cube didn’t have a built-in speaker (no space) or audio jacks (presumably no space even for that). Instead, it came with a custom Apple speaker set-up consisting of a central DAC box with hard-wired USB and speaker connections on one side and a headphone jack on the other.

Mine’s in somewhat shabby shape, and I don’t want to use it anyway.

I have a Yamaha AV receiver, Monoprice 5.1 speakers, and an Optoma 1080p projector. The receiver and the projector both support HDMI. What I really want is to be able to route the Cube’s audio and video together into one of the receiver’s HDMI ports, so that the Cube can be alongside my PS3, my iPad, and my MacBook Air as possible external sources to be presented through the receiver’s speakers and the projector.

And that’s what I have.

This adapter takes video input over VGA and audio input over USB, and outputs HDMI.

It’s an HDMI port for the G4 Cube.

Yes, the ideal solution would use digital video from the ADC port, but nobody’s going to make such an adapter for ADC today. A DVI one could exist, but would probably be way more expensive, and require also purchasing an ADC-to-DVI adapter cable.

The VGA output looks fine. The Cube can output up to 1600×1200, and it looks great on my wall.

The only real drawback is that Mac OS 9 (or maybe the video card) never heard of 1920×1080, so I can’t actually output the native resolution of my projector.

My wonderful Cube

My G4 Cube has 1 GB of RAM, an SSD with more free space than I know what to do with, and an HDMI port, to which I’ve connected a 1080p projector and 5.1 speakers.

And it’s completely silent. (Although admittedly the projector ruins that.)

It’s a cool little machine.

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