New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX - G4 Cube

[neilhart]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

I did get my G4 Cube this afternoon. I can not resist loading system software and playing with it before the tear down phase. Loaded 10.3.2 because I had it handy. Seems to run okay. Running updates which will take it to 10.3.9.

The internals appear to be in good shape where the clear plastic case is going to take some polishing to make it presentable. I paid $50 USD and feel that I got a good deal.

The plan is to put the Intel DH61AG low profile motherboard into this cube while keeping it simple. As I have stated before I no longer feel the need to have a optical drive in every system and I may reuse the proximity power switch (or not).

Photo story to follow.

neil

PS - the cube just rebooted into 10.3.9 for the first time. Time to play.
And I just realized that someone has put a 80mm fan in this thing near the bottom plate blowing though fins of the heat sink. And it is a nice job.

 

[minihack]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

And I just realized that someone has put a 80mm fan in this thing near the bottom plate blowing though fins of the heat sink. And it is a nice job.

Yes, Apple put the fan mounts (but no fan) in all Cubes. There is a theory they put them there in anticipation of the Cube being successful and them launching more powerful models. Usually though you only find people have bothered to put in the 80mm fan if there is also a processor upgrade kit fitted (such as the Sonnet kits). I don't suppose you were lucky enough to have an upgrade in yours that the last owner didn't advertise? If so, it's worth a lot more than $50 (which in any event is a steal!).

 

[beelzebozo]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

Before tearing mine down to mod, I ended up updating Leopard on my cube to 10.5.8. Although I enjoyed the feeling of owning a real Mac, in the end it's performance was less to be desired. I maxed out the RAM and upgraded the GPU but even still it was just too outdated.

I tried to fanagle an ATI 9700 into it and ended burning up the CPU!

 

[neilhart]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

And I just realized that someone has put a 80mm fan in this thing near the bottom plate blowing though fins of the heat sink. And it is a nice job.

Yes, Apple put the fan mounts (but no fan) in all Cubes. There is a theory they put them there in anticipation of the Cube being successful and them launching more powerful models. Usually though you only find people have bothered to put in the 80mm fan if there is also a processor upgrade kit fitted (such as the Sonnet kits). I don't suppose you were lucky enough to have an upgrade in yours that the last owner didn't advertise? If so, it's worth a lot more than $50 (which in any event is a steal!).

Well it appears that the cube had the GigaDesigns 1.5GHz M7 cube upgrade (M7-1315C).
I have the CPU board (with the copper heat spreader still attached) in my hand and reading the labels and web search turned up this description.

So now the decision is to re-assemble the cube and try loading a newer version of OS X or proceed with the tear down.

Edit: I re-assembled the cube and have it running. It reports as 1.4GHz G4 with 2 MB L3 Cache and 1.5 GB SDRam. I would like to put Leopard on it but the internal DVD drive just spits the Leopard DVD back out (probably because it is dual layer). And using my USB DVD drive I can read the Leopard DVD and mount but the system won't boot from it.
So doing a little home work to find a way.

neil

 

[minihack]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

And I just realized that someone has put a 80mm fan in this thing near the bottom plate blowing though fins of the heat sink. And it is a nice job.

Yes, Apple put the fan mounts (but no fan) in all Cubes. There is a theory they put them there in anticipation of the Cube being successful and them launching more powerful models. Usually though you only find people have bothered to put in the 80mm fan if there is also a processor upgrade kit fitted (such as the Sonnet kits). I don't suppose you were lucky enough to have an upgrade in yours that the last owner didn't advertise? If so, it's worth a lot more than $50 (which in any event is a steal!).

Well it appears that the cube had the GigaDesigns 1.5GHz M7 cube upgrade (M7-1315C).
I have the CPU board (with the copper heat spreader still attached) in my hand and reading the labels and web search turned up this description.

So now the decision is to re-assemble the cube and try loading a newer version of OS X or proceed with the tear down.

Edit: I re-assembled the cube and have it running. It reports as 1.4GHz G4 with 2 MB L3 Cache and 1.5 GB SDRam. I would like to put Leopard on it but the internal DVD drive just spits the Leopard DVD back out (probably because it is dual layer). And using my USB DVD drive I can read the Leopard DVD and mount but the system won't boot from it.
So doing a little home work to find a way.

neil

You are lucky!

To install - I would normally Carbon Copy Clone an install disk to a USB stick and start from that. However, PPC Macs won't start from a USB, so my suggestion if you have one is to carbon copy clone the install disk to a firewire drive and start up from that........

Alternatively of course you could install Leopard direct to another IDE HD from one of your systems (making sure the disk is formatted in old style Apple format) and just slide it into the Cube.


I don't know whether people actually achieve their prices, but upgraded Cubes like this certainly are put onto eBay for hundreds.

Best of luck and with your profit maybe you can buy a Cube collection to rival Eelhead.

 

[roto31]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

Neil, the reason it spins or kicks out the disc is that the cube originally did not meet the specs for Leopard which was an 867MHz G4 at minimum. Hardcoded to the hardware specs for the machine are the original specs of the machine which were either a 450Mhz or 500 Mhz G4 and it is not seeing the processor upgrade. I had the same issue with a G4 Sawtooth that I had put a processor upgrade into.

The best way to install Leopard would be to connect it to another Mac or a hackintosh that has FireWire with a FireWire 400 cable, start up the Cube holding down the T key which will start it up in Target disc mode. It will then mount on the other Mac an another hard drive. Now you have two different options, put the Leopard disc into the Mac or Hackintosh and then install Leopard as usual and select the Cube as the install location from the Leopard install. The other option works if the Mac not in target mode is natively running Leopard (has to be an actual Mac or it will not work properly because tonymacx86 additions will screw up a regular install) and use Carbon Copy Cloner and do a full exact clone of the drive.

I have used the same methods to get Leopard on a Sawtooth G4 ad others that did not meet specs for Leopard. Both results work well, the first option is the quickest way to do it.

I am also wondering once you have the internals out of the G4 are you keeping them or would you be possibly interested in selling them?

 

[beelzebozo]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

The best way to install Leopard would be to connect it to another Mac or a hackintosh

Well not exactly.

You can install OS X Leopard on a cube by tricking the firmware which is easy to do:

1. Reboot your Mac and hold down the Cmd-Opt-O-F keys until you get a white screen with black text. This is the Open Firmware prompt.

2. Insert the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD.

3. Type the following lines exactly as shown below into the Open Firmware prompt. Be mindful of capitalization, spaces, zeros, etc. If the command is properly typed and understood, Open Firmware will display "ok" at the end of each line after you hit "return". What these lines do is set the CPU speed reported by Open Firmware to OS X as an 867 MHz G4 processor system. They then continue the boot from the DVD drive.

For single CPUs, use the following three lines:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

Continue the install normally.

I was able to load and install Leopard on my Cube by doing this trick.

 

[neilhart]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

A little off topic - follow up on the G4 Cube that I purchased this week with the intent of using it for a new home for the Intel Dh61AG motherboard. It turned out that the cube contained a CPU and Fan upgrade (see above) and was/is functional.

I tried several ways to get Leopard to install onto the upgraded G4 Cube. What worked was the suggestion from minihack where I used a hack and Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Leopard install DVD to a hard disk in an external Firewire/USB enclosure. The cloning was via USB. Then booted to that external Firewire drive and the Leopard installer ran without issue on the cube.

I then cloned the cube to the external Firewire drive and ran the 10.5.8 upgrade, also without issue. Then cloned 10.5.8 off the external drive. And ran the standard software update process installing 8 updates; Safari and iTunes updates are included.

The G4 Cube running Leo with the updates boots in a respectable time (less then a minute) and Safari runs well (no faults or halts). However video in is jerky.

My current thoughts are that this upgraded G4 Cube is an interesting bit of history and is unique enough to be saved from the scrap heap for now.

So I am now looking for another Cube to use for my Intel DH61AG project.

neil

 

[tviolation]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

The G4 Cube running Leo with the updates boots in a respectable time (less then a minute) and Safari runs well (no faults or halts). However video in is jerky.

My current thoughts are that this upgraded G4 Cube is an interesting bit of history and is unique enough to be saved from the scrap heap for now.

Indeed, an upgraded Cube is a fun machine! I've got mine tricked out with a 1.4GHz G4, 1.5GB of RAM, a quiet cooling fan, and a Radeon 7500. It runs Leopard fine and it just plain screams in Mac OS 9.

If you want to smooth out the video performance, my experience is that the video card is the limiting factor. The G4 is a chip that's held its own surprisingly well over the years and you'd be surprised how well it runs stuff. I had a low profile GeForce 6200, flashed with Mac ROMs, in mine for a bit and video playback was silky smooth. That's about the fastest low profile AGP card you can find, unfortunately, but it was a fun experiment.

 

[beastyfellow]

Re: New Player - Low Profile Intel DH61AG mini-ITX

@beastyfellow:

Can you confirm that I have the right links to all the extra stuff mentioned in your guide? Also, which boxes do you have checked in Preferences-->Energy Saver?

DSDTFixer:
http://www.osx86.net/news-announcements/8397-dsdt-fixer-evox86.html

Latest SleepEnabler:
http://www.osx86.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=1948

AppleIntelE1000e Ethernet driver
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=205771&st=0

Thanks!

@slowjin, yes these are correct ones.

Sleep works immediately the first time, but the second time it took about 20 seconds before going to sleep, but wake was immediate with USB and wifi up and running right away

@slowjin, my system sleeps and wakes with no visible delay, regardless if it's a first time, or fifth. Try pulling off USB peripherials and see if and which one causing issue.

2. Get LVDS up and running with a touch screen, creating a iTouchMac

@slowjin, LVDS is a tricky one. You'll need to flash custom BIOS to get it enabled. Beware not to burn your panel - make sure you set correct voltage

@neilhart, @slowjin
SpeedStepper sounds tempting. What puts me off is that it's very dependant on OSX rev., i.e. different versions for 10.7.1 / 10.7.2 / 10.7.3. I can see it may cool CPU down a bit but it's a high maintenance for me personally to keep it up with OSX updates...

USB3 is still unusable. Works with LaCie driver, but connected devices fall off after wake