UPDATE! After more monkeying, the L2 is back in action with an extra 130MHz backing it up! w00t!

Here's a CPU test from Xbench 1.1.3 after the mod:

Post edited by: boodle, at: 2004/08/16 10:58

The same Titanium tested @ 1.0GHz before the mod:


Post edited by: boodle, at: 2004/08/16 11:00

As noted in the mod guide, it seems at least one fan is constantly on now which is a bit of a bummer 'cause I like it quiet.

Note: If you try this mod be wary of solid kernel panics on restart after messing with the clock or voltage. This is not necessarily bad! If your machine panics due to a bad setting or bad weld it may corrupt some volume information on your drive. I was able repair it with DiskWarrior 3.0.2 and continue testing other settings.

Post edited by: boodle, at: 2004/08/16 10:57

very cool. You've gained some significant performance from the looks of the benchmarks. Is it noticeable? Does you computer generate too much heat now?

I am afraid that is one mod that I would never attempy . But I must say, that kicks ass! Congrats. Did you take pictures and what not? Are you planning on submitting this in the mod challenge? I hope so, it sounds great.

Cheers.

krusher117 wrote:

It's not that noticable in everyday use, but qualifies as that "extra oomph". CPU-bound games definitely show increased responsiveness. I've reactivated journaling on the main partition and can no longer tell the difference between having it off or on (like I could when @1.0GHz).

It doesn't seem any hotter but, like I said, at least one fan is constantly on making it almost as loud as this silly Vaio sitting next to me.

oojacoboo wrote:

Thanks! I was hoping to be the first to get the Titanium DVI overclocked but since someone else beat me to it I'll leave it to them to submit the guide. I may post additional pictures, though.

I plan on entering a case mod in the challenge provided I can get the documentation together before leaving for the desert.

Phew!

My Titanium 867 is finally overclocked to 1.2GHz and working... Oh, and hello everyone, i'm new here

Complete history goes like this:
I configured the PLL for 1.13 GHz, rebooted and... things started getting wee bit weird and i freaked out. The fans WOULDN'T COME ON as much as usual, bottom was rather cool (under low CPU utilisation, ofcourse) etc. CPU Director kept reporting 333 MHz so i thought i may have accidentaly screwed up the soldering and downclocked my pbook. Then again, i thought, you can't downclock this titanium that low and fired up XBench.
Turns out my overclocking actually worked (136 points on CPU)!!!
Either there's something really wrong with my particular machine, or everyone's overreacting about heat issues, or... well, it turned out i DID make an error with my soldering work - i accidentally soldered bit no. 2 closed on position "1" instead of unsoldering all the bit 2 leads... I doubt that'd made it behave differently, though...

Anywho, i decided i had my share of soldering 1mm SMD bugs with a 4mm chisel tipped gas iron and caffeine/sleep-deprived shaky hands
for a while, so i reverted to some less demanding work - installing a new 80GB / 8MB cache / 5krpm Hitachi drive, cleaning up the pbooks internals, sucking up a few keys with a vacuum cleaner and having to dig through the dust bag :x
did i mention trying to make a hard drive image with ASR to my PC over SMB work?

Later on, armed with a new 1mm pointed soldering tip (smallest they had), some more caffeine and a cut finger, i decided to do the last step - overclocking to 1.2GHz. Some minutes of really ugly and dirty work later (new tip kept oxidizing and eating up the solder from the SMD pads), i gathered my hopes and fired the machine up and - it started booting... and died... and booted again... and froze...
Bumping the voltage up to 1.4V seemed like a right thing to do (i justified the decision by telling myself i reached the point-of-no-return). So i did some more uglIER and dirtIER work with capital IER. Among other "minor inconviniences" that happened to me are the unfortunate catapulting of SMD resistor with tweezers, getting the forementioned SMD stuck behind the combo drive ribbon cable and having to search for it with a loupe, almost frying half of the surrounding components etc.


Finally, i booted up and ran Xbench. Results:
CPU Test - 147.04
Overall score - 117.38


CPU Director reports 1.2 GHz, sysctl says 766 MHz (unless i tweak the variables in Open Firmware by hand).
The first fan fires up after about 20-30 minutes of idle run, second one kicks in only under full CPU utilization.
Everything seems to be (*knock* *knock* *knock*) rock solid and stabile for now.

End of (hi)story, thanks for listening...

Ante Vukorepa

PS: Please excuse any/all spelling/grammar/vocab errors and confused train of thought. English isn't my native language and my train of thought currently is confused.

Good job on the mod, as my hands are too shakey naturally to do that kind of mod.

You should post some pictures up if you have the time and a mod guide for your paticular PowerBook, so others will not make the same blunders while modding. I bet a lot of people who have the hands to sauder that close would like to know which angles to approach the best and hand wrests.

As for your English, it's just fine.

And as a final note, are you planning any additional mods to your PowerBook?

Thanx! My hands get proportionally more shaky the more expensive the equipment i'm working with is
I'll try and make some photos / write something up as soon as i get better (i got a bit sick since yesterday) and catch some time.

About additional mods: yes, i'd like to do some more stuff with my powerbook in the near future... First of all, i'm trying to find some 512MB SDRAM SO-DIMM's so i can bump up my RAM to 1GB... I know that doesn't account as much of a mod, but i need the added 512MB because things in Photoshop are getting a bit too slow for my taste.
Further down the line, i think i'll try looking into doing a paint job on the titanium - i always thought black top and bottom would go nicely with the standard white apple logo and middle "stripe". Kinda like the old lombards (i always found them cooler looking than titaniums). If the black paintjob could be made glossy as well, that'd be really cool! But, at the moment, i don't have a clue as to doing it - what kind of paint, where to get it, would it require taking of the original paint and primer and applying new one, how to do that... If anyone has any ideas, please yell...

Also, there's one more thing concerning the white sleep LED on my wishlist. Apparently, the LED's behaviour is fully customizable and controllable via software! There's a patch for linux kernel that enables it to use the LED as a hard drive activity indicator. So far, i haven't found anyone who'd know anything about ways of implementing a similar feature in OS X (not necesserilly just HDD activity - new e-mails, CPU activity, battery power, there's a lot of things you could use the LED for), and i was too lazy to look into it myself... I thought maybe an easier approach could be a hardware one - soldering a wire to the appropriate pin on the IDE connector and getting the signal to the LED somehow (AFAIK something in/around the PMU drives it). You could probably leave the original connection in place because PMU keeps the LED off except when in sleep, and since HDD doesn't do anything while the pbook is sleeping, there "should" be no ill effects (short circuit, overcurrent?).

Ante Vukorepa

PS: Sorry for lenghty posts...