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G4 Cube Modification for ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
NOTE: The following procedure requires mechanical skills and may damage your equipment, your G4 Cube and your Radeon 9000 Pro card even if you are very careful - proceed at your own risk only!
So you want your Cube to run Quartz Extreme?
We did, too! And, as you can see below, fitting the card has been possible without changing the outside aspect of the Cube very much. The only differences are the screw holding the Power Board in its new location (top arrow) and the different video ports from the graphics card (bottom arrow):
The conversion it is not all that difficult - the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro only requires you to modify the cut-out for the video ports on the graphics card (we skipped this and live with a slight angle to the ADC connectors) and it requires relocating the power board that normally sits next to the graphics card (documented below).
What we did was to simply remove the Power Board and fit a set of reasonably thick cables (comparable gauge to the power cables for hard discs) between male and female connector of the Power Board.
Getting a suitable male and female connector, making a cable of suitable length and feeding this inside the Cube's innermost guts was the most challenging part of the job. - the picture below documents where the cable starts (left arrow) and ends (right arrow - this is the lower end of the cable in the following picture):
The Power Board itself was strapped into its new location:
Of course we took extra care to securely fit the board in place (note plastic angle at the bottom and the clear plastic tab from left to right at the top) and insulating it from any contact with the hard disc assembly behind it or the DVD-ROM before it (not mounted in the above picture).
The graphics card itself fits snugly inside the larger space left by moving the Power Board. At the top right of the picture below you can see some foam spacers we added to prevent vibration of the card (remember our card is at a slight angle as we did not enlarge the cutout for the ADC+DVI ports - we don't want any shorts to happen in the AGP port):
We are not providing details of how to perform every step - anybody with the skills to disassemble and reassemble the Cube without a hitch should be able to figure this out for themselves (and if you can't do that you should keep your Cube in the original working state - this is not an easy conversion!).
We have the new system running for several days at normal office temperature (20-22° C) without any noticeable problems. In fact the only thing that changes is the noticeably faster display - we did not notice any elevated temperature or the need for a fan!
Note that we have not installed any processor upgrade in this Cube - if there is any upgrade manufacturer willing to loan us a unit we will do that, and document the process here!
Questions, comments, suggestions? Drop us a note!
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