A Mac question- can they be overclocked?

[damocles]

I assume not because i have never seen it done nor seen O/C components for sale but I am curious as to whether it is possible

 

[kgraeme]

Yes. My old 1997 G3 has jumpers on the board which can be used for overclocking. And just recently one of the new 867MHz G4s was overclocked to 1GHz.

Here

It's a resistor hack, so not for the faint of heart.

 

[damocles]

That's pretty cool. Thanks

 

[kgraeme]

Keep in mind that while it's possible, the hardware isn't really conducive to overclocking. The jumpers on my system are for Apple's benefit to set for different speed processors and is not intended for end-users to fiddle with.

There are processor upgrades, but they are rediculously expensive.

 

[grant2]

I remember reading an article on how to overclock the 68000 in your amiga from 7.xxx mhz to 14.xxx mhz. involved soldering though!

and then there was the one on how to bump your 2400bps modem to 9600bps by swapping an inexpensive chip...

... so anything's possible if you have a soldering iron!

 

[kgraeme]

I just did it.

 

[PliotronX]

Do all recent Mac models (G3, G4) have heatsinks without fans? If you could get some Arctic Silver in there with a nice Delta black fan, chances would be better for a successful overclock, I'd say.

 

[LordSandMan]

Actually, after you close the case, the powersupply fan is right over top of the heatsink. I agree, some artic silver would probably help.

Here is a pretty good website for OCing Macs.

 

[kgraeme]

Macs have always used passive cooling. There has never been a fan on a Mac heatink, at least to my knowledge of 16 years of working with them. The current G4s have the most internal cooling ever with their 120MM intake fan.

While a bit of thermal compound and a fan might help a bit, I suspect it wouldn't do much. Otherwise Apple would have probably done so to get over the year-long slump of no speed increases out of Motorola. They're rather desperate, so I can't imagine they haven't tried it internally.

 

[GD695372]

That amiga used a 68k? I believe that the newer Texas Instruments calculators use 68k's, and are overclockable throught the same means. The soldering involves removing and replacing a capacitor i believe, which functions as a clock crystal for the calc. I was half-tempted to o/c the Z80 look-alike in my TI-86 via the same method, but I would have had to mess with surface-mount circuitry, and that's something that I don't intend on ever messing with.