I've been looking to upgrade my AGP Sawtooth for some time now so when the opportunity knocked... (click for full sized images)

Introducing my most recent of impulse purchases, a 733mhz Quicksilver CPU card.
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I'm interested in seeing if it will run in my Sawtooth. Apart from the obvious size difference in the two cards, there are other basic differences between the two machines. Firstly, the Quicksilver has one less RAM slot. Additionally, the Quicksilver has a 133mhz bus speed versus the Sawtooth's 100mhz.Meaning the CPU (if it works) is likely to run at 550mhz... Perhaps some overclocking is in order.

First step is to get the old one out. Bearing in mind I've never actually removed one of these CPUs before, they look a darn sight more complicated than your basic Pentium/Athlon.
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Removing the old CPU was actually quite easy. So easy infact that all I needed was a philips headed screw driver. I could pull the heatsink clips off with my fingers, they just needed a gentle push down and pull out and the heatsink was free. Then the philips headed screw driver to remove the screws holding the CPU in place. Little bit of a tug and the CPU's off.

Some observations before I continue. It has become apparent that I will need to remove the IDE plug the CD-ROM is connected to. Not really a big deal, just increases my need for a PCI IDE card. We'll get onto the removal later.

Another observation. We should be damn lucky our CPUs run sooo cool compared to an x86 CPU because this has got to be one of the worst heatsinks I've ever seen. Not only was the contact shit-house with very little pressure on the core, but there is at least 1 cm of solid aluminum before any dissipation would happen. If you know even basic thermal dynamics, this is really_not_good.
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Ok, so here is a pic of the two cards side by side. As you can see, the quicksilver is larger and will hang over the side of the logic board.
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Ok so onto the removal of the IDE port. If I were any good at soldering, I would consider putting it on the other side or attaching a cable directly to the logic board. Unfortunately I'm not a good solderer so the ports gota go. I STRONGLY advise people NOT to take my approach, it was stupid and I'm lucky not to have caused some serious damage to the logic board.

What was my approach you ask? Attack the thing with pliers. No I'm not kidding, the first pic shows the carnage half way through. I think a better method would be to have gotten some wire cutters or my trusty dremel and simply cut/remove the pins holding the port in place but I was in a hurry.
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Ok, IDE port all gone. I wonder if the computer still works?

New CPU mounted and attached fine.
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Oops, the Heatsink doesn't fit anymore. Not only does it not make contact with the core (by like 1/2 a mm) but it's fouled by the capacitors to the side. I "could" get out the dremel and cut the side off but am thinking of a better idea. I will attach a PC heatsink that I have lying around. Easily done. However, as it sits lower on the core (without the 1cm of solid aluminum) the mounting clip (from the original heatsink) needed a bit of a bend to hold it firmly in place.

Oops number 2. This new heatsink is fouled by the zip drive cage when the door is closed. Danmit. this is turning into a lot more effort than I had hoped for. Looks like it's dremel time after all. That'll have to wait until a day when I don't have work and impending assignments of doom.

I dremeled the heatsink and it now fits quite comfortably. I would hazard a guess to say it will be more efficient than the stock apple one despite being smaller and probably vastly insufficient for any x86 CPU. So everything on... yep. Ok time to check.
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Hrm... it doesn't boot, doesn't even make a sound. Not a good sign. At this point I start feeling woozy, thinking I've just hacked up a perfecly good Sawtooth and now it's not even going to work. But a more indepth google has revealed an answer. The CPU needs extra power. I've also found a decent site for overclocking the card. Will give it a try after I get it working.

I found an old 4 pin molex to 3 pin fan adapter which I mutilated and have attached it to the card with just a nut and bolt. Time for test number 2....
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So here is everything installed.
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3 beeps?!?! What do you mean 3 beeps. Where did I put that ram guide. 3 beeps means "no good banks" ie borked ram. No worries, I'll just open my bag of goodies and find another few sticks that work. Ready for test number 3....

Allllll goooood! Thats right. Working like a dream. But like I mentioned earlier, only at 550mhz due to the lackluster 100mhz bus. Not a very significant jump from 450mhz.

So what's next?

Well... firstly I need a PCI ide card since i now have only one IDE port.

Next I feel some overclocking is in order. 8x multiplyer should do it giving me 800mhz of raw powah! I've found a quick guide and it's a simple task of moving a resistor from one spot to another. The difficult task will be convincing my electronic engineer friend (who happens to be good at soldering unlike yours truly) to perform the modification for me.

After that? I think a flashed 9800pro is in order and perhaps a bigger HDD.

EDIT: just to clarify... this was written in bits over the course of a few days because I was too busy to do the whole thing at once, explaining some of the oddities of it. It's like a work log despite being posted at once.

EDIT#2: I will update with some OSX screenies later. And I suppose again once the multiplyer mod has been performed.

You're a brave, brave, insane, brave, man.

I think Atomic and bonsai are two members you should be chatting to. Bonsai i am sure recently posted a nice article about clockchipping quicksilver CPUs specifically. Should not be too hard to find with the search function If you have trouble let me now and I'll chase it down for you). It's all good fun isn't it?
I reckon 800MHz should be easily achievable in your baby (this is pure speculation but if it was designed to run at 767 MHz if the PLL multiplier can give you 8 times you should be laughing??) Good luck with all of it anyway.

cheers, kim


PS (I clockchipped my 400 MHz sawtooth to 500MHz. Bonsai has done the same I think. He used aL2 cache voltage boost. I did not bother)

This is very cool. Mac people tend to be quite reverential toward their hardware and I can imagine this would make some people sick/angry/whatever but I reckon it's quite gutsy and the kind of thing that would make the Woz proud.

Hi

I have a processor upgrade in my old sawtooth which is 1.2GHz which runs great.

thanks kim. yeah, it was mainly for kicks. This box doesn't get a whole lot of use other than web surfing and word processing. Hopefully it'll run at 800mhz no problems then maybe it can be put to more constructive use, like warcraft 3.

/Dr Frankenstein voice "I call it, the QuickTooth"

you've got to love dremels.

the 733 can easily reach 933mhz even with the stock sawtooth heatsink with just some thermal paste but with 933mhz on a 133mhz bus that is only 700mhz on the sawtooth... 800mhz on a 100mhz bus would not be possible i dont think unless you got watercooling handy and are good at small soldering beacuse a voltage boost is in order :P

I've seen references to OCing the Sawtooth's Bus speed from 100 to 133mhz. Has anyone tried it? I would imagine the 733mhz @ 133mhz bus would be better overall than the 800mhz @ 100mhz bus.

From what I read, it can be done via OF without any soldering. Is this correct or is the OF thing only to fix the time problem (clock running 33% faster). If it can be done via OF, that would be cool because if it screws up, I can simply manually reset the pram and it should all be back to normal.

I was reading up on it on xlr8yourmac last night. Doesnt seem to be that stable from what they were saying.

to upp the Bus speed it is very simple just put in 2 100% identical sticks of ram and your bus will run at 133mhz but the system profiler will still show 100mhz but when you use xlr8's utility (forgot name) it tells truth about it.

The bus speed overclock from 100Mhz to 133Mhz on a Sawtooth mobo isn't stable, and the performance increase if the mod is performed is negligable. Give it a burl at 800, 8.5, and hopefully 900Mhz will work Jobe Perhaps if you also modded a fan or beefier heatsink onto the chip this might help too.

The Open Firmware hack to overclock is false, it merely alters the Mac's firmware to report a higher CPU speed, when it's just the same clock speed. I recall a post on a Mac forum where people swore that it made their machine considerably faster :unsure:

ipod_man - you can certainly use PC133 RAM in a Sawtooth Mac without any problems, but the RAM is sychronised with the bus speed in this case, ie. 100Mhz RAM @ 100Mhz bus. Putting RAM rated at a higher specification into a Sawtooth Mac definately won't overclock the bus to 133Mhz. The XLR8 utility that you refer to might offer to adjust the backside cache speed, which is often set at a conservative level and can be clocked higher. The other day I used it to set a Wallstreet G3's RAM from 120 to 150Mhz (2:1 ratio), which made me feel warm and gooey. However, this doesn't result in a great deal of improvement, if any, real world performance.

JB

ok. I bought a PCI ata card however I only just realised now that it doesn't support removeable media (optical drives/cip drives etc) only fix hard drives. So this poses a new problem and question.

Can I boot from secondary hard drives? As in, can I put the DVD-ROM and ZIP drive on the only remaining IDE channel on the motherboad (the primary cahnnel that I didn't mutilate) and put the HDDs on the PCI ata card and subsequently boot from one of them?

Guess I'll just have to give it a try

With the DVD-ROM hooked up to the card, the mac freezes at the grey displaying nothing screen at bootup. I think it gets stucking looking for the attached drives.

I don't see why not... OpenFirmware can boot from any disk, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Well here are the screeny I promised (click for a slightly bigger and readable image) just to prove to everyone that it is infact working. Though as I said before, only at 550mhz. I have convinced my EE friend to do the soldering for me, just a matter of time.
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