Apple Cube Biohazard graphics card mod

Andre Beckedorf — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:40:05 +0000

Since I’m in the mood to document various hardware modifications, here is a link for the archives:
http://www.katastrophos.net/macosx/9000pro-mod.html
This is a tutorial written in German for a mod I did way back. It describes how to modify the case of an Apple Cube to actually insert a better graphics card along with proper cooling of the components.
Much of the article deals with how to relocate the DC/DC board to the inside of the Cube to make way for the bigger graphics card. It goes on to describe how to modify the graphics card with a better heatsink. Finally, it shows how to cut the outer casing for proper cooling.

You might ask, why this is called Biohazard mod. Check out this and that.

OS X 10.4.3 Update available

Andre Beckedorf — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:25:43 +0000

So, with 10.4.3 now finally being available, I had to do a quick’n'dirty benchmark in Xbench before and after the update.
The test was run on a freshly booted system in a clean user profile with no background processes running. Four iterations for each OS version.
The test system was my rather slow 1.2 GHz 7455 Cube equipped with a Radeon 8500.

Overall 10.4.2: 34.99 (min) / 35.95 (max) / 35.65 (avg)
Overall 10.4.3: 37.37 (min) / 38.77 (max) / 38.08 (avg) ~7% gain

Here are three sub-scores that differed most:

Memory Test 10.4.2: 16.55 (min) / 17.31 (max) / 16.95 (avg)
Memory Test 10.4.3: 18.11 (min) / 18.52 (max) / 18.28 (avg) ~8% gain

Quartz Graphics Test 10.4.2: 45.47 (min) / 46.17 (max) / 45.85 (avg)
Quartz Graphics Test 10.4.3: 49.69 (min) / 51.67 (max) / 51.06 (avg) ~11% gain

User Interface Test 10.4.2: 30.52 (min) / 32.08 (max) / 31.25 (avg)
User Interface Test 10.4.3: 34.92 (min) / 36.63 (max) / 35.66 (avg) ~14% gain

Katastrophos.net Blog » Cube

Apple Cube Biohazard graphics card mod

OS X 10.4.3 Update available