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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nSo it happens I got my hands on one after all these years. Continue reading if you are interested in my little retro project \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Two years ago, I was a few minutes late to a post from my colleague offering the latest model of iMac G4 for free. Here in Sweden, they have their own version of saying “Good things come to those who wait,” and in this case, it came true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In January, I was browsing Blocket.se (something like a local eBay) and by a complete accident, I stumbled on an ad for a functional iMac G4 from 2003. An opportunity I couldn’t possibly miss. I hopped on tunnelbana (local name for subway) and went to central Stockholm to pick up the iMac. The guy, P\u00e4r, turned out to be a long-time Mac user, which meant he had to survive a couple of my Mac monologues (I just couldn’t help it \ud83d\ude05).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I was almost on my way home with an iMac G4 packed in a paper box. I needed to do a couple of errands first. I went for a lunch with a big paper box. I picked up a couple of semlas for fika, which meant I carried a second small paper box on top of my big paper box. I ended up walking a couple of kilometers with these. Probably not the best planning, but totally worth it. Especially since I unknowingly bought the semlas from a shop which won Stockholms b\u00e4sta semla 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next obvious step was to decide what to do with it. I saw three choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (1)<\/strong> Leave the iMac mostly as is. A nice decoration for my home. Turn it on occasionally to look at the nice Mac OS X UI or play an old game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (2)<\/strong> Do a full conversion project. Replace the motherboard with DockLite G4<\/a> and put a M4 Mac mini into the machine like this guy<\/a>. Or perhaps something even more daring such as also replacing the original screen like this guy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (3)<\/strong> Upgrade the original iMac as much as possible and use it for retro gaming primarily with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger + virtualized Classic (OS9) environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third option was the one most aligned with my skills, nostalgia and me not wanting to be completely lazy about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PowerPC 7455 <\/a>CPU is soldered to the motherboard. While it is theoretically possible to overclock it, in practice this does not work<\/a>. No upgrades are possible unless you are these guys<\/a>. Sadly, I am not \ud83d\ude00. There is a removable heatsink, so it might not be a bad idea to replace the thermal paste in between. After all, the machine is 23 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra GPU name sounds powerful but is actually quite a slop<\/a>. Too bad the last model of iMac G4 did not get ATI Radeon from 9XXX series. FX 5200 is soldered to the motherboard. There is a passive heatsink on top of it which is not meant to be removed. Nothing to do here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two RAM slots. The first one (PC-2700 200-pin SO-DIMM<\/em>) is designed to be user accessible by removing the lid on the bottom of the machine . The second one (PC-2700 184-pin DIMM<\/em>) requires the bottom plate with the motherboard to be removed. iMac was already on the official Apple max RAM capacity (2x 512 MB) but it works with two 1 GB modules and they are quite cheap to buy so why not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DVD drive works fine. No need to change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original 3.5 ATA hard drive must go. The capacity is small, random read\/write operations are painfully slow and it’s quite noisy (in the annoying way). SSD can solve all these problems but the bus bottleneck will remain. The last G4 iMac missed SATA just by one year so I am stuck with Ultra ATA-100 which provides 100 MiB\/s bandwidth (half-duplex).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The battery on the board is dead. Without it the computer does not remember the date and time after reboot. Finder in Mac OS X 10.4 refuses to create new files\/folders when the date resets to 1976.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a fan at the top of the dome. I figured I can replace it with a more modern one while I am at it. I saw Noctua NF-A9 FLX 3 being mentioned in couple of places so I decided to copy cat this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The iMac I got was missing Wi-Fi capability. Fortunately there are plenty of AirPort Extreme cards available on eBay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bluetooth is not present as well. Since it was a BTO option, many (most?) iMacs do not have it installed. Unlike the AirPort card, Bluetooth was not meant to be replaced\/upgraded by the user. There are two pieces. A bluetooth board (922-5661<\/a>) and an antenna extension cable (922-5808<\/a>). Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to buy these parts (for a reasonable price), so I will be skipping this. These guys<\/a> managed to install a newer Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR module and splice the antenna cables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t want to go in blind so a little bit of RTFM is need:<\/p>\n\n\n\n First I need to build a service crib. Apple manuals showcase the service crib technicians used back then. I can use that as an inspiration. It is important to build it so the dome can rotate and the bottom plate is not sitting on anything thus it can be easily removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Removing the bottom plate cover reveals the user upgradable parts. Slots for a SO-DIMM memory module and the AirPort card. Both can be upgraded really easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I remove the entire bottom plate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Removing the frame with DVD and hard drives is quite easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There aren’t many SATA SSDs left on the market. The world has moved to NVMe blades. The choice was basically a budget drive from Crucial or a more solid (and expensive) product from Samsung. The choice is very obvious considering the usage and ATA bottleneck. Most people who made an iMac upgrade video solve this problem by taping the 2.5 drive little further back to gain enough space. could have copied this approach, but I would be left with an unused OWC mounting frame. Instead I used the back 3.5 drive screw holes to put the whole mounting adapter even more back into the drive space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, this moved the ATA connector even further away from the logic board (+\/- 3 centimeters longer cable run). The original 10cm ATA cable is not long enough unless the DVD drive is sacrificed so it can take a shortcut through its space. So I went shopping for a longer but not too long ATA cable in 2026. Not easy. I almost made a dumb mistake buying a 40-conductor cable (only black connectors) which supports only up to Ultra ATA\/33. Later I found almost perfect cable Dell P1361 ATA cable 80-conductor cable<\/strong> which is 16cm long<\/strong>. The cable length is more than sufficient. It actually needs to be folded a bit when putting the bottom plate back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n StarTech ATA\/SATA adapter comes with a MOLEX splitter. A nifty thing (more on that later) but in the tight space this needs to go someplace. There is plenty of room next to and on top of the SSD so cables are secured there with zip ties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jumpers on both drives were set to Cable Select<\/strong>. A lot of iMac upgrade guides instruct users to set the mode to master\/slave. This makes sense for the older iMac G4 models where there was only a single ATA cable for both devices. In the latest model of iMac G4 each drive has it’s own cable so I thought it is the best to keep the same configuration Apple originally set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The main fan is located at the top of the dome just above the 3.5 HDD. Since I was already planning to remove the DVD\/drive bracket, I figured I could install a more modern, efficient, and possibly quieter fan too. I saw someone using<\/a> Noctua NF-A9 FLX 3<\/strong>, so I ordered one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I should have read the whole thread because there are a couple of differences between it and the original fan:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The open\/closed side is not a complication for me. Someone with more knowledge about these things can probably explain what difference this does to the airflow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The solution to the connector difference could be cable splicing. There was a second option given by StarTech SATA\/IDE adapter board. Remember the MOLEX splitter? Noctua comes with a MOLEX-3pin cable. So instead of using the original power cable from the logic board I hooked up the fan to the power line for DVD\/SSD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original fan has the rotor mounting on the airflow intake side. In theory, this can help to protect the fan blades from anything protruding from the HDD drive space. With the stock HDD, there is nothing there protruding. With my SSD build, there are plenty of cables which might get dislodged and poke the fan blades. With Noctua, there is nothing protecting the rotor blades, so I need to be extra careful when packing all the power cables in the HDD drive space with zip ties. Nothing must stick up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Noctua package, there are two additional “extension” cables which can be used to reduce the fan RPM, thus the noise. Since I intend to play games on this machine, which stresses both the CPU and GPU to the max, I thought I should probably leave the fan RPM at the default values. To my surprise, the amount of noise in this configuration is actually higher than with the original fan. The Noctua fan itself is perfectly quiet, but the sound of the airflow is definitely higher. If you are replacing the original fan with the same Noctua model and have the intention to reduce the noise, I strongly recommend experimenting with the speed reduction cables<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When putting back the SSD\/DVD frame, I need to be extra careful to align it properly. It is not too hard to attach it some millimeters out of position which can create a problem for DVD tray to DVD door alignment. The second thing to watch out for are cables. There needs to be enough spaces next to the DVD drive to fit all the cables going to the logic board. I have it slightly more difficult since the new ATA cable is longer than original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New RAM and board battery can be easily installed. The battery type is ER14250, 3.6V, 1\/2AA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As all manuals say, it is extremely important to clean the heatsink contact surfaces between the bottom plate and dome. In my case the paste there is completely dry so it is a very good thing I decided to open up the iMac. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I have plenty of thermal paste a remove the CPU heatsink and replace the paste between in and G4 CPU. The original paste is not dry so this might have not been necessary but certainly does not hurt. The process can be seen in this YouTube iMac video<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the most stressful part. Does it start up? Drum roll…. I hear the POST chime. It does! Let’s put some proper Mac OS X versions on it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The AirPort Extreme card supports 802.11g standard. This is fine with modern APs since SSIDs are usually configured to be backwards compatible with older 802.11 standards. What’s not compatible is the Wi-Fi security. The AirPort card only supports WPA1 which is outdated and insecure. The minimum in 2026 is WPA2 with the world moving towards WPA3. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Depending on where you live Ethernet might be a better option. In my case I can safely operate SSID with WPA1 dedicated specifically for iMac usage. Mikrotik complains about mixing this together with newer 802.11 standards: “using TKIP with n\/ac\/ax bands is not standard compliant and may not work with some devices<\/em>” but it works. Plus the special SSID can be disabled most of the time when the iMac is not in use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lately, I have been quite nostalgic for Macs from the early 2000s. So many examples of bold and beautiful hardware design. Each new version of Mac OS X adding amazing features yet maintaining overall simplicity. There is one Mac in particular which amazed me but I never really met it person – iMac G4. So … <\/p>\nThe spec<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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The plan<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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The operation<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/crib1-768x1024.jpeg\")
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe SSD project<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/drive_removed-768x1024.jpeg\")
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For SATA-ATA conversion and mounting, I went with a StarTech adapter<\/a> and an OWC 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch Drive Mounting Adapter Tray<\/a>. I thought this would be a safe choice. Turns out it was nothing like that. When the 2.5 drive is installed at the end of the frame as expected, two problematic things happen:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/hdd_build1-1-1024x768.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/too_much-1024x768.jpeg\")
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nFan time<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/fan1-1024x768.jpeg\")
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nPutting it back together<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/close-768x1024.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/battery_ram-1-1024x768.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/battery-1024x864.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macadmin.cz\/wp-content\/uploads\/heatsink-768x1024.jpeg\")
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nLegacy Wi-Fi note<\/h1>\n\n\n\n