I was perusing through a local thrift shop I go to everyday after work. There it was, a Quicksilver and what I correctly assumed was a Sawtooth. 5 bucks for the sawtooth, and 10 for the quicksilver. I tested it as best I could, it seemed to be fine enough. Onward home.

I've wiped the drive and loaded tiger, then added a radeon 7200, 768 megs ram, FW and USB 2 card. Best of all it had a working Airport b card, sadly though, the airport connects to my network but does not connect to the internet. Same result with 2nd card, so I think wireless is out for now. I can sell the card easily enough. Has anyone had luck with overclocking the 733 processor to leopard speeds?

I'm thinking to use it as an old school mac gaming station with OS9 and OSX, and a super mega itunes ripping machine. The one thing that has always bothered me about the G3 B&W through the G4 and G5 cases is the lack of a 2nd optical drive. I'm thinking of maybe an ATX case mod with plenty of drive bays.

Though the thought of stripping it back down and just selling it has crossed the mind too. I already have a mac mini as a jukebox with good specs and a 2nd external Dual layer dvd burner.

Ideas, opinions, musings.....?

As far as running leo, look into LeopardAssist. You shouldn't need to overclock anything. Overclocking G4 without the use of upgrade processors is a shaky proposition at best.

Check out the arcadiMac thread while your at it.

What does the arcadiMac have to do with the QS?

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/quicksilver733_overclock.html

Overclocking is a grab bag. Some machines are great overclockers, others not so much. If you're mildly experienced with soldering and basic electronics skills, there's little risk of doing irreparable damage during the process. Dually noted for destroying a chip with "too much" overclocking. What kills a chip is excessive heat, not clock. Starting the computer without the heatsinks attached properly (or without thermal paste) is a good example.

http://powermac-g4.com/g4quicksilverclockup.html

http://www.macbidouille.com/articles/22/page7

Volt-modding, (not described on any of those links) is a bit more dangerous. However, there's quite a good chance you'd be able to get up to 867mhz on the stock cooler. A simple thermal paste replacement and a higher airflow fan mounted on the CPU HS, and you've got yourself a stable Leopard machine.

Hey that's a great idea, actually.



I had mentioned in my post about using it as an old school gaming machine, since it can dual boot OS9 and OSX. Marathon here I come. Maybe I could find the roms for the Metal Slug series.

Metal Slug + arcadiMac = way too cool.

Damn, I completely missed that. My apologies.

Great find. I wish I could find things like that, $10 for a Mac (even a QS) is awesome.

While overclocking will get you up to "Leopard Specs", it won't get you much more. If you really want to get your QS running OS 9 in light speed you'll need to invest in a G4 upgrade card. I took a look at a few of them a while ago and posted the article back in December of 2006. There have been a few upgrades since then, but it is worth taking a look at so you know how much you can actually gain with an upgrade card. You should see similar results as the QS and DA have a lot of the same stuff inside.

Here's the post ....

http://www.macmod.com/content/view/877/192/