733 in a G4 400

The 733 should work in the 400 I believe, but the 400's only have a 100 mhz bus speed while the 733 machines had a 133 mhz bus, so you will not get the same speed out of the processor. Not positive if it will even work though.

If your not afraid of a little bit of soldering on the Processor card, thats potentially a great upgrade... However....

My GF had a 400mhz Sawtooth that was given to me, so i passed it on... we needed a little upgrade to get her up to speed so i picked up a 733MHz processor card and heat sink from a Digital Audio series. I dont remember the exact speeds, but if you dont change the resistors on the card it'll run slower. If you switch the resitors on the Proc card around to accomadate the 100MHz bus (which is what i did) that Processor runs PERFECT at 800MHz.... The downside is that because the processor board is larger than the sawtooths, and the sawtooth and the Digital audio series have differnt board layouts, when you put the DA processor on the Sawtooth board the secondary IDE header (the one that has the cable to your internal CD/DVD drive is in the way of the processor seating properly and needs to be removed from the board in order for the processor to seat correctly. So unless you solder the IDE cable directly into the board (without the header and IDE connector) the only wy around that is to just remove the header from the board and use and external enclosure for the CD/DVD drive.

ALSO... the heatsink is much larger and in order for me to get it to fit and have the case close properly i needed to use a dremel and cut the first two rows of fins on the heatsink down to 3/4 their original height and also use the dremel on the case and pretty much remove Almost all of the metal for the internal drives (you CAN still have a CD?DVD mounted in the top bay, you just need to trim the HECK out of the mounts, and lose the tray below it [for zip drives/etc] entirely... of course, unless youve soldered the IDE cable straight to the board you no longer have a CD/DVD drive anyway) also a little bit of the chassis near the power supply needs to be cut off as well.

This sounds like a CONSIDERABLE amount of work (and it was) but it was all done in an evening and booted up PERFECTLY on first boot and has run 100% stable for many, many months now (of course, its going to be retired since she is of the mind that she only needs one computer ever and shes getting her new macbook on tuesday.. so the G4 is coming back to me)

Again, if your into tinkering, i REALLY reccomend you GO FOR IT and, I took TONS of photos of the process (most came out pretty poorly though) So i can host up whatever you want. I can also look up the table for you to tell you what resistors to move on the Proc card, but thatll take a while sinceim going out for the day.

Hope that info helps.. Good luck,
Bill

I suspect that there are others besides me that who's interest was piqued by this. I'm picking up a 400 and this sounds like a fun hack! How about a visual "how to"?

GH

not a problem. I'll post up a new thread in the "Hardware Hacks" tomorrow.

/Bill

What a coincidence - I'm about to perform this exact same hack (and I registered just to tell you all that)! Any further details about what exactly you needed to do, evilrobot, would be greatly appreciated...

jx

Apologies for ressurrecting an old post, but just want to say that I've finally completed a similar hack to this - and all without any soldering (though with rather liberal use of my Dremel as in evilrobots post - and the careful application of some conductive paint)!

If anyone's interested I can post some 'after' pictures and go into more detail (sorry - didn't think to take pictures during the process). All in all, I say it was a rather worthwhile hack, even for a relative novice.

jx