This Retro Mac Laptop CPU Upgrade is CRAZY Fast!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ค. 2022
- Usually when people need a faster laptop, they just buy a new one. But in the late 90s, some Apple PowerBook owners took a different approach.
Thank you to viewer Hrushka ( / hrushcollects ) for sending these upgrades to show off!
Sources:
"PowerBook 1400/117," Macworld, January 1997.
"Apple's Next-Generation Systems," Macworld, January 1998.
Nupowr G3 1400 eBay photos: www.ebay.com/itm/284881211952...
"G3 Upgrades for PowerBooks," Macworld, March 1999.
Performa 6400 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"X Arrives," Macworld, November 2000.
"Vimage Drops Mac Upgrade Business," Macworld, November 1999.
MacsOnly's report on Interware bankruptcy: web.archive.org/web/200106241...
Blog with some history on Interware/Vimage and ultimate bankruptcy: web.archive.org/web/200803220...
"What's Hot," Macworld, May 2001.
"Newer Technology rises from the ashes," MacCentral: web.archive.org/web/200208030...
"Interex enters bankruptcy," Wichita Business Journal: www.bizjournals.com/wichita/s...
"OWC acquires CPU upgrade maker PowerLogix's assets," Macworld: www.macworld.com/article/1791...
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It's crazy to think that a CPU from 1998 cant touch a CPU from 2008 in terms of performance, ram etc, but a CPU from 2008 (like the intel x58 stuff) is still quite usable today
Agreed, have a X79 machine with a 3ghz 10 core Xeon and it still kicks ass for what I do with it. (Mainly older games)
I knew these upgrades were a big step up but never benchmarked them. It's incredible to see more than an 8x processor score increase! 😳
Thank you for sending them to Colin for everyone to check out!
I wish old processors were remade in 7nm. Could give life to many old machines.
Upgrading the 1400 was worth it to keep that sweet, sweet keyboard.
my man! Do you have any PowerBooks you can consider upgrading with this booster module?
The 1400 is arguably the laptop that kept Apple afloat during the late ‘90s “beleaguered” years before Jobs’s iMac.
I loved mine. Ran it for many years. Wish I would have kept it for nostalgia reasons now.
i always remember seeing it in mission impossible 1 (or a very similar model)
Gotta love the colourful but comprehensive Japanese packaging of the era. Quite a striking difference from the overlaid, Y2K, Hopeful graphic design that was mostly seen in the West.
The PowerPC Wild West era was fascinating, you could procure chips to upgrade Macs and also Amigas. I miss how competitors would one up each other in innovation and performance. Computing has gotten boring, aside from some fringe cases here and there.
Advances have become more incremental. Also, back then, the CPU was the major bottleneck, so you could have massive performance gains by having a faster CPU, but still a slowish bus clock.
When RAM and GPU became bottlenecks, experiments with RAMBUS and AGP happened, until it eventually culminated in the ever increasingly faster DDRx and PCIe standards.
Back than you could just replace an 8MHz 286 with one clocked at 20MHz and have more than twice the real performance. Today, doubling clockspeed, even if it were possible, would only boost border cases. But you wouldn't feel that improvement in your typical user experience, as RAM, GPU and SSD would still have most of the influence.
@@graealex yeah difference between even an older 2600k at 3.4ghz vs 4.6ghz isn't even 10% so nowadays the difference in actually performance is simply instructions per cycle instead of frequency
I'm glad there are people that can explain this far better than I ever could but I know that it's a very different world than the one when these were around. I remember looking at them hungrily but knowing there was no chance of me getting one not at $500 or more.
you have to see the Interware's other accelerators packaging, Woz edition accelerators. that had a cartoon Steve Wozniak, and some others.
@@Crixer234 You got a source for it or maybe some clues on where to go? Seeing that stylish box art kinda makes me wonder how the Woz was depicted!
Edit: Nevermind. Found a few pics on eBay. Not quite as cool (or sexy, not to diss the Woz) but pretty neato. Thanks for letting me know.
Man, this brings me back to far more interesting times. I never had an Apple computer back then, but just you saying that ripping CDs was often the most computationally intensive thing a computer would do, brings me back to those days. Today, by comparison, it's all too easy, with Spotify and noise-cancelling bluetooth earbuds.
Oh man, CD to MP3 ripping! That takes me back, and I remember being similarly blown away when I went from a PII 266MHz to a PIII 866 sometime in 2000. Despite "only" being 3.25x faster in raw megahertz, my encoding speed more than octupled! Oh, and Quake III friggin' flew LOL!
The 90s were upgrade heaven to someone who worked on computers as a hobby. I was a PC hobbyist but it was a similar experience, mostly on desktops. Every couple years was a new thing. The computer I'm using now is 4 years old and showing no signs of needing an upgrade. My laptop is even older but switching to Linux gave it new legs and will last for a few more years easily.
Yeah, it's amazing how even a naive install of most distros can extend the life of hardware. I bought an old Dell Precision that had Win 8.1 on an HDD as a hobby project four years ago and while it chugged in Windows for the day or two before I chucked the OS, it ran pretty snappily in Debian 10. Granted, I changed the HDD out to an SSD shortly afterward and used the former as secondary storage, but even then, basic desktop performance wasn't improved that much in comparison to Windows, which nowadays I legit can't imagine running Win 10/11 on spinning rust. Wish I still had it.
Cool video! I still have a real fondness for laptops of the 90's and for upgrades like this one!
The the late 90's & early 2000's saw a number of laptop upgrade companies go bust on the PC side as well. The laptop repair depot I worked for in the late 90's through most of the 2000's did a rather robust business selling CPU, HDD & RAM upgrades for 386 & 486 laptops in the early to mid 90's but by 2000 that business had all but completely dried up. With the price of laptops in steep decline as a whole by the turn of the century it increasingly didn't make nearly as much sense to spend several hundred dollars upgrading an old laptop or fixing one that was out of warranty unless it was something relatively low cost like a keyboard, stick of RAM or a HDD.
Props for sourcing both versions, in original packaging.
Sonnet made a similar drop-in G3 for the 1400. I installed one in mine over a decade ago. It comes with a single screwdriver with a Phillips on one end and a socket on the other.
A word of caution about the battery: I too used to tape over the contacts. But one time I went to remove the battery and found that the charging contacts had somehow gotten stuck in the tape and one broke off.
Now, I use an empty battery shell that I popped open, dumped the cells out of, and snapped back together. For a while I used it as a storage bay for my earbuds.
That said, not a single 1400 battery pack I have has ever leaked.
Clever marking strategy they had, I’m sure someone just bought it for the Box art instead of the actual G3 card in it.
Ah the footage of old computer magazine backpage ads takes me back. Computer Shopper ftw!
Man the PowerBooks are just an amazing kind of laptop series. I just wish they had been made of a better material instead of the brittle ABS plastic.
💯
G3 was an overall a game changer for Apple. I probably wouldn’t gotten into digital video editing without it to be honest.
I had a PB1400 back from about late '98-2000. I put in a G3 card, but I don't remember which one. My problem was that my computer crashed constantly. I put up with it, but I eventually ended up with a G3 "Pismo" PowerBook. Dropped a G4 into that, when it became available, and used it until 2008 as my main computer. The 1400 was a cool machine. It's interchangeable lid and inserts was fun, if frivolous. But, IMO, it was a wonky machine.
The Mac CPU upgrade market was pretty cool. Hopefully you backed up the drivers from that floppy!
Very cool idea thanks for the upload
Sonnet still hosts drivers for all their old upgrade cards, and even for cards for companies they bought out. That's top tier support.
My teacher did an upgrade to one of their Macintosh Performa computer in the early 2000s, because that computer ran old software and ran better than the G3 iMacs did!
It's crazy to think that was possible or true and yet it totally was.
What a time to be alive.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu upgrading the CPU in Macs are rare, especially when my teacher was obsessed with Macs, she used to talk about Macworld. I loved that time when Apple computers were easy to upgrade or mod!
@@Markimark151
Yeah I remember that time well, I remember seeing these in magazines and stuff and I always wanted them but could never afford them. Still looking back it was amazing to think this was even possible. A very different time than now that's for sure.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu I used to look in computer magazines, that was before online shopping. Macs, Zip Drives, Mac OS 8, etc. Even though lot of stuff was expensive, it was fun just to look at products featured in magazines!
Love the box art.
of course you do coomer
@@ps5hasnogames55 whatever makes you feel like you have power dude. Im a fan of the comic style but you seem to know me better than myself.
@@corngames8982 lol triggered
@@ps5hasnogames55 yup
I had a similar G3 upgrade in my 1400 back in the day. It was my primary Mac until I bought a new 12" PowerBook G4 in 2003.
I never touched Mac until Windows 10 came out. There was a all world of technology out there that I missed because for 35 years I was an admitted Windows fanboy. Now my main computer is my 27” iMac (so obviously not a M1) and my most used laptop is my Manjaro KDE.
Yeah I went back and forth between Mac and PC in the late '90s but mostly prefered PC simply because it's what I could afford at the time and even these upgrades were well out of my price range. Mac has its place 100% more now than ever but the pricing still puts it well out of most people's hands depending on what they want to do.
That SS7 K6 clip at the start made me smile.
I remember installing an Interex G3 processor upgrade for my PowerMac 7500. It was expensive, and incredibly fast.
Love the video Colin, like all your others too this brought waves of happy memories of this, the true and awesome Apple. I'm saddened that they traded their army of dedicated friends of which I was one, for as many mere consumers they can squeeze as many dollars as possible from. RIP Jobs and the true Apple we knew and loved.
Great retro reviews, up there with Techmoan.
“Attention grabbing packaging” 😂😂😂
i still have my original 1400 which i upgraded using the Sonnet version of this card, i did the full 64mb of RAM as well but took out the video out card as i thought it would not fit well with the cpu upgrade, maybe i will try to fit it in one day after all :) thanks Colin :)
I have done the CF swap for the hd and that works quite well, also gets rid of the noise :)
1:54 That's some cultured packaging
coomer
Ah, always good to see fellow cultured gentleman here.
Impressive swap!
should probably upload that driver to the archive for safe keeping.
when u said attention grabbing package i started cracking up
God I loved this period with its laptop upgrades. I had a 3400 I loved.
Imagine Apple Silicon in a case like this. How much room for a battery this would give.
uhm...not much unless it use lithium polymer
There's a 100Wh limit for batteries that can just be brought on airplanes. Many thin laptops (such as the 16" MBP) these days already hit that mark.
Doesn't matter either I could bring it on the plane or not. Just imagine the amount of battery life. Probably days
@@JaymeEduardo yeah but that can only apply to M1 and M2 chip
Yes, that is the idea. M chips are one of the most power efficient ever. I managed to let my MacBook pro M1 128 hours in standby. That's insane
Imagine going from 5Ghz to 13Ghz.. the gains back in those days were insane.. I remember upgrading a good old slot cpu in those days long long ago..the first one did not have a cooling solution (just a small passive heatsink) the second one I added a fan manually so I could overclock the cpu.. I upgraded from 133mhz to I think it was 450mhz.. I remember I had to change the FSB which was quite the hassle as a 13 year old fingering around in bios. I think I upgraded from a Celeron to a Cyrix 3 with a socket to slot adapter.. I wish I still had the hardware man..
You should consider an aluminium ifixit driver. I think the control of the easier to turn handle is necessary with increasingly complex repairs.
The upgrade was definitely worth it.
I feel like the iBook G3 series had a similar CPU daughter card layout, but my 600 was swapped out by Apple as said daughter card was a lemon design.
Such a shame that the 3400c couldn’t be upgraded like this one. Still have ours from 1997.
Back then, I remember begging for the speed an upgrade like this would give. Today you can get more performance from a Raspberry Pi. 🤯
Bring back more upgradable laptops
I always wanted this! I OC'ed mine to 240Mhz tho
I have basically the same upgrades on mine, except it has sonnet's 333mhz card, and unfortunately has the passive display with no video out.
Did you use the card to register for the warranty?
And I thought I had a slow computer back then, but it was a 533mhz celery. I regularly ripped CD's at multiples of real time.
I miss the days of socketed laptop CPUs, slowly but surely, the modularity of computers are disappearing for no good reason, when back in the day you could easily get a platform that you could steadily improve as tech aged, you can't do that now, effectively limiting how long a computer will last :/
There is plenty of reason to solder a CPU these days. Also, power and thermal management makes it usually impossible to swap to a different CPU anyway these days.
But now the hardware lasts longer than back in the 90s
@@magnusharrison2715 I don't know if it lasts longer, but "the CPU upgrade you want" will already have a different socket anyway, as most technical advances will involve the overall system, and not just a CPU that is clocked faster.
@@graealex I realize that there are good reasons today to have things as BGA as opposed to in a socket, like there were good reasons to have things in a socket beforehand.
I don't think that saying "but power and thermal management" is a good argument when you take into account that around the time that directly soldered CPUs were brought back for laptops, was also around the same time that more and more companies started going towards anti-repair/anti-upgrade/anti-modularity practices moreso. It's generally pointless to say that things can't be modular because the systems in place for laptops can't easily be made modular, since the companies who made those systems were specifically designing them against modularity and user-service.
@@mattsparks3546 One shouldn't mix up necessary evil associated with advanced integration, and purposefully designing hardware not to be repairable.
Prime example is permanently soldered RAM and SSD.
G3 accelerated to its bleeding edge is still a roller skate.
I had a 1400. I remember the desire for the upgrade card. But I couldn't afford it at 14.
please upload that disk driver to somewhere so people can find it
OWC also likes to massively overcharge on things
synthetics giving a 10x benchmarks and 4x speed increase on standard use cases. is just insane. could you imagine if such a thing came out today!.
Booster/bustier, I see what they did there. 😂The hardware inside seems like it was pretty good too, though I'm pretty sure it was the "software" on the front of the box that got consumers' attention.
As soon as you get a PPC Mac that sonnet purple is basically the same thing as gold.
Hey - I have a 1400 and was wondering if you knew where I can get a replacement screen. I have 2 and they are both so dim they are basically un-usable.
"Real Time Encorde"
I had a 1400 though I didn’t get a CPU upgrade for my unit.
Upload the contents of the floppy diskette to the internet archive?
hey i have a 400 mhz powerbook! wonder if its worth putting on ebay
I have an even faster G3 upgrade in my PowerBook 1400. 466 MHz Sonnet. I actually got the last remaining unit in stock directly from Sonnet in 2008.
I remember looking at these upgrades a lot but I could never afford them. And by the time I could they were completely unnecessary.
Still it's cool to look back and see how cool they actually were. These would have been amazing had I able to get my hands on/afford them at the time.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu I forget how much I paid for mine in '08. IIRC it was significantly marked down from the original price, but I think it was still at least $150
@@MatroxMillennium
It's crazy to think a) they still had it around in '08 and b) that it still made so much of a difference.
I was always fascinated by all these upgrades even though I couldn't ever get them. Looking back it was a glorious golden age of upgradability an age we have moved far past at this point with Apple.
Hey looking your clip dont forget beford your backing-up your cd .clean the lenz wich, lenz cleanner 24h for beter copy.
It would be great if you could dump and upload that driver disk to an archival site like the internet archive or macintosh garden, this is exactly the type of situation where it might just get lost to time if no one bothers to archive it and the original disks start rotting away.
already did ;-)
@@ThisDoesNotCompute
Where did you upload it? I am having trouble finding it.
I wish someone would make a new Macintosh Plus accelerator
what’s the name of the song in the first part of the video? around 1:00 to 1:30?
The PowerPC 603e 100MHz, of the base, 1997, PowerBook 1400 and 5300, produced an almost identical 190 Dhrystone MIPS benchmark score to that of the 162MHz SA-110 StrongARM, of the 1997 Apple Newton MessagePad 2000 series, and those ran of four AA batteries, for days, and cost a sixth the price, thats including the Apple tax. Was this "Reasonable performance" ?
It blows my mind that the motherboard built for one generation of PowerPC CPU will mostly "just work" with a newer and vastly improved generation of CPU, albeit with a driver extension to get full performance. In the PC world you'd need to not only reflash the BIOS in order for the machine to even start with the new CPU (and that's assuming your motherboard manufacturer even has an upgraded BIOS) but the socket might have changed and it would be impossible to upgrade.
Given that 604 Macs could use G3 CPUs and G3 Macs could use G4 CPUs, would it have been possible for a 604-to-G4 upgrade card to be made?
"in the PC world" you mean mostly in the Intel world. AMD supported the same sockets and chipsets for multiple generations of CPU, only changing when they have to.
@@ps5hasnogames55 Even with AMD you still needed a BIOS update before you could just drop in a new CPU of a later generation.
Does anyone know the size of the thermal pad used in this accelerator?
I have lost it. I would like a replacement.
Now if only the damned more modern apple laptops were that easy to work on. The Ibook G4s are a real pain in the d|(&, gotta pull out like 80 screws and unplug about 10 connectors just to frikking change the HDD......
Time for Tiger
Is that an HDMI port 4 minutes in?
It's going aight, how about you?
Disappointed you didn't use the supplied tools for the job! :(
I remember being super impressed by these back in the day but I of course couldn't afford one for my sad, slow little Mac.
Pretty much unless you were doing something super intensive or business related it just wasn't worth the investment. I certainly didn't have $500 or more to throw around back in those times that's for sure.
Did you know you can buy IDE SSDs? So wouldn't need an adapter or anything else. Generally they cost 2x what an equivalent SATA drive costs.
There are also 2.5" IDE adapters/enclosures that can take an M.2 NGFF/SATA (not NVMe/PCIe) drive (or mSATA, depending on the enclosure). I used one of those to upgrade my Mac Mini G4 from its spinning drive. Makes for better performance and reliability than an SD or CF adapter, as while those work well for up to mid-90's machines, they can be limiting with mid-00's machines.
So will it run OSX?
I wish intel and amd would make more powerful CPU's for older platforms once in a while.
like maybe some 10+th gen i5 for the S775 slot, more performance, less watts TDP.
wouldn't be a super seller, but real nice for some of users... :P
AMD have literally supported socket AM4 with 4 generations of CPUs. it's only Intel that gets a new socket every time they make a new CPU.
@@ps5hasnogames55 I am well aware, just put a 5600G, going directly from a 1700, in my b350 chipset mobo the other day.
what I meant was current socket CPU tech in older sockets. so in AMDs case it would be putting some Ryzen tech on am3+ or older.. or simply re-manufacturing an old CPU in newer fab, shrinking it and making it more energy efficient and running cooler etc.
Dump those floppy disks on internet archive
And now you know why modern laptops and macbooks in particular are made to be almost impossible to repair let alone upgrade
I will always miss those times where you could change the CPU and even the GPU of your laptop, now you can't change things anymore, even the storage is soldered on some of them
part 2 of this video: run Mac OS X Tiger on that PowerBook and upgrade to SSD
So, did these upgrades end up giving the option of OS X or not?
Not on a 1400, because OS X required a PCI bus, and the 1400 was still based on NuBus. But the G3 CPU upgrades for most of the desktop machines that used the 603 and 604 also allowed for the use of OS X, although it wasn't supported by Apple.
While I'm not (and never was) a fan of Apple, this is a level of upgradeability sorely lacking in modern hardware, even with the need to include 3rd party upgrades to make it work. It's especially notable when looking at restoration/repair videos of laptops from just 10 years ago, with insane modability and easy access for most upgrades. Nowadays, I'd have to unscrew and unclip the entire back panel of my Lenovo laptop just to add a new RAM stick. This is BS, plain and simple.
I'm glad not everyones a fan. The new laptops are terrible, the M1 ones were fine, but the M2 models got downgrades for the base models. Not only that, the M2 Macbook Air throttles heavily to the point where it's barely any faster (and the 10 core GPU is WORSE than the 8-core one due to the throttling) and the M2 Macbook Pro is reaching temps of 100°C+ under heavy loads. It's just embarassing and yet there are fans defending them despite this being a massive scandal for other companies.
@@xPandamon Yikes! Don't follow Apple product reviews, but thermal throttling on an Air sound really uncomfortable to hold, much less use.
Apple, why did you choose evil.
Cuz it was the most profitable obviously. RIP Steve. RIP the Apple we all knew and loved.
Hear me out: M2 chip replacement card
Imagine if Apple still build good notebooks.. The new M2 Macbook Air throttles heavily and the M2 Macbook Pro reaches 100°C+ when under heavy load.. Both are inacceptable for different reasons and it boggles my mind how their products are bought that blindly nowadays. Other brands aren't perfect either but they're either cheaper with similar results or put in more than the minimum effort required to avoid such bad issues.
Imagine a power9 upgrade lol
Dang, what happened to Apple. They really should have kept up with making their laptops upgradable.
Bro I thought that video card had an HDMI port 💀(correct me if I'm wrong)
This is a new video? I swear I watched this before...
when you could still easily disassemble apple
I understand the removal of the batt however if this upgrade is going to take less than an hour or you’re not shipping the laptop to another location then why tape the batt.? For a job like this taping the batt is unnecessary, but hey you do you.
I assume he didn't do it specifically for this upgrade but as a general attempt to keep the battery in the laptop without wearing it out while it is plugged in.
@@denny1527 Rather because he never uses it without having access to wall power anyway (making the actual state of the battery irrelevant), and leaving the battery connected for a long period will lead to it leaking and possibly destroying the machine which is the main issue he wants to avoid. The only reason the battery is there at all is no not leave an ugly gap - if the cover was separate from the battery, the battery would most likely not even be in the machine.
@@maighstir3003 That's mostly what I meant while writing the previous comment. I actually did the same thing to my Dell Inspiron 9300, I would've removed the battery entirely if it wasn't for the fact that one of the rubber feet is on the plastic battery cover, and there's a large hole at the bottom of the machine without it.
Hi! I have to powerbooks G4. One is 1.64Hz, and the other one 1.25Hz. Do you know if I can swap the CPU modules? (I want the 1.64 in the body of the perfectly preserved 1.25)
if they are the same size and same screen type (the final 1.67ghz 15/17 inch had a different screen to older ones), you could do a board swap, as the cpu isn't socketed in those models
@@windowsxpnt2347 Excellent! I think they have the same exact screen and same exact everything apart from the CPU. I'll give it a try. Thank you!
@@JuanJacinto check the screen resolution, if one of them is 1440x960, you have a high res one and it might be harder to transfer the board into the better case
apple products you could upgrade, haha look today keyboard or button on iphone 😄
#AI implementation on #GPU &* #CPU 🐶🥬🧄🍄
Man Japanese products are amazing makes ours look super depressing in comparison