TiClock - Ocerclocking the PowerBook G4

TiBook Got Power!
It´s saturday morning (050226) I am on the way to PUSH 2005. A meeting for PPC users in Gothenburg. The day before I had made a deal with a man who had a PowerBook for sale, to go by and get it. Said and done, I bought the PB just before I got to the meeting. When I got there I took my bags and was showed to my seat. There was already alo´t of people there. Now It was time to increase the speed from 400Mhz to 500Mhz. Could this be done?

Preparing
For this procedure to go well I needed to prepare somewhat. First some caffein to ease my mind, then a smoke to calm my nerv´s. First we started the PB to take some before pictures of the 400Mhz PB. Some of the people at PUSH couldn´t believe what was going on. "Are you really going to try and overclock it?" they said. Well I was going to try, at least. The PB had been mine for almost two hours so it was a little bit risky to throw almost 4400SEK away before I have had the time to use it.

Starting
I started with the eight screws underneath the powerbook. If you remove the battery on your PB you will see a picture of what I did. When they where all gone I powered the soldering iron.

The Procedure
What I needed to do was to find the resistor called R221, I found it near the power jack. In the upper left corner. (if you have the DVD aiming down) I needed to move the 0Ohm´s resistor from R221 to the R217 position. The 0Ohm´s resistor is "really" small, so it got lost when I was going to put it in place at position R217. No danger here, the 0Ohm´s resistor are a jumper so I used a small peace of cable to make a solder bridge instead.

About This Mac
Done with the procedure It was time to se if I had succeeded in overclocking my G4 400Mhz to 500Mhz. This was some crazy seconds. Turn it around and put the power cable back. Pressed the power button and seconds later the sound of "Im starting" went on. This was good to hear. When OS X had started we go to "About this Mac" and now there was a 500Mhz G4 in the PB. It worked, grrreat as you friend Tony would have said.

Another
On the day after I overclocked another PB G4 400Mhz to 500Mhz, and that procedure went great. So the other owner was going home with a PoweredBook :).

Conclusion
I don´t recommend others to do this if you don´t have experience in soldering and know your way around small components. This is a bit tricky and you can really waste you PB with this kind of procedure. This is no HOWTO and I take no responsibility of you try this on you own PB and destroys it.

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I want to thank Aaron (http;//viosine.org) for making this before, and giving me some info on how to do this.

There are pictures in the gallery of the procedure.

/Johan Gulldén 2005

Added:  Monday, February 28, 2005
Reviewer:  Johan Gullden
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