I just bought a "broken" MDD (FW800) Power Mac. About an hour of testing later I have it working One bad memory stick, that is all that is wrong. Now I have another perfectly viable MOS system. It even has an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

I'm going to set this up with MOS 2.7 and run it side by side with my 2Ghz Quicksilver. I am curious how the 2 will compare with the MDD having (in theory) such a better memory interface.

Way to go Red!
That's how I obtained my Quicksilver (for $17).
It was listed on Ebay as non-functioning.
When I got it I re-seated the CPU card and it started up fine.

Great buy.
Odd, we're both in the same situation.
I have a quicksilver with an accelerator too, and my 1.42 MDD arrives tomorrow via UPS (I mentioned this in another thread, yet another Ebay buy, only $85 after shipping).

BTW - From what I've seen, when you install an accelerator in a Quicksilver the memory benchmarks go up dramatically.
And since the G4 processor doesn't really benefit from DDR memory I've always wondered about the benefit of its use in the MDD.

Just received my 1.42 MDD and I'm swapping in my components from my Quicksilver.
Wish me luck guys.
I hope this one works.

Edit - Well it works, but the clock isn't keeping time when its off (probably a bettery).

I thought everyone said MDDs were noisy.
Its louder than my Quicksilver, but no louder than most of my PCs.

[ Edited by Jim 09.04.2012 - 19:58 ]

Congrats Red, for finding a great buy on a FW800 PowerMac, and to Jim, also for finding a good buy on his new FW800 PowerMac.

Now that both of you have accelerated Quicksilver PowerMac's and the fastest stock Apple G4 PowerMac, it would be nice for you to provide some benchmark test results and some real world user comparisons of games and/or applications, between your FW800 PowerMac's and your accelerated Quicksilver PowerMac's.

I would like to know how much the faster system bus and memory, plus the L3 cache, helps to even out the overall performance of the FW800 PowerMac, when compared to the faster clock speed of the G4 in the accelerated Quicksilver's.

If it is not too much trouble to just swap out the hard drive (or SSD if you are using one) from one PowerMac to the other and run the same tests, then we would know that the results had nothing to do with differing speed of two different hard drives.

I am guessing that on some benchmarks, or game/application comparison tests, the L3 cache and faster system bus & memory will bring the FW800 PowerMac almost even, if not slightly faster, than the accelerated Quicksilver PowerMac's.

Do either of you have plans to over-clock your FW800 PowerMac's up to 1.5GHz, or faster, from the stock speed of 1.42GHz? I ask because I am thinking of doing that myself, but first, my plan is to over-clock a single 1.25GHz G4 CPU module as fast as I can push it and remain stable. If I can get it up to, or over 1.5GHz, I will probably leave my dual 1.42GHz G4 CPU module at the stock speed and outside of my PowerMac as a back up in case my single G4 CPU module fails some time in the future. Since I have a dual 2.7GHz G5 PowerMac to run MacOSX on, I don't need to have dual CPU's in my G4 PowerMac MDD and can use it for running MorphOS alone, without any dual boot capability for right now.

@Jim,

I think the FW800 PowerMac's make much less noise than the earlier MDD G4 PowerMac's did, because Apple received so many complaints about the noise from those earlier models of the MDD PowerMac. IIRC, some people have stated that Apple even offered replacement fans to early owners of MDD PowerMac's to reduce the amount of noise, so it is most likely that Apple put these less noisy fans into the last versions of the MDD PowerMac's and that is what is inside your FW800.

Edit: No surprise that the battery is dead. It should be the same as the one in your Quicksilver I think, but you should buy a couple of new batteries for both systems.

[ Edited by amigadave 09.04.2012 - 15:35 ]

Thanks David,
I was expecting jet engine level noise, but this things quite quiet. Your explanation make sense.
I did not run the benchmarks on my Quicksilver, before I moved everything into the FW800, so in order to run them I'll have to move everything back.
I don't know about Red, but I'm going to try to overclock to 1.5GHz.
I just exchanged messages with Dreamcast270, and he's had luck doing that with his machine.
Heck, right now the hottest thing in this case is the back side of my 9800XT video card.

> since the G4 processor doesn't really benefit from DDR memory
> I've always wondered about the benefit of its use in the MDD.

In previous discussions here on MorphZone, I think we've established the following benefits:
* DMA devices apart from the CPU accessing the memory
* marketing ("double" sounds faster than "single")
* better availability and/or pricing of DDR modules vs. SDR modules

You might remember this thread from over two years ago:
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6910&forum=11&start=11

Ok, I am gearing to do some benchmarks. I will start a new thread. Any benchmark suggestions, let me know.