01/17/02

New desk pictures

We have updated our Cube gallery with two pages of users' desks. You can find them here and here. If you have pictures of computers that are not Cubes, we are going to open a new gallery soon. We already have some pictures that some of you sent. If you have some, please, send them here.

New Cube site : Cubeowner.com

A new Cube site is born. It is called Cubeowner.com. They don't have a lot of info yet, but we are sure it will be a great source of info in the near future.

01/15/02

Cubes used in Star Trek

One of our readers, Jof, sent us a picture showing Cubes on the Star Trek Enterprise. Here is what he says and the picture : "Hi, I thought you migfht like to see this picture I was sent from the set of Star Trek: Enterprise. Yep, the whole ship is run by G4 Cubes... "

Are Firewire CD burners dangerous for your Cube?

Two of our readers are making comments about using a Firewire CD-burner with a Cube.

Please tell your reader I own the same Formac burner, and when it fried one of my G3 towers' firewire ports, I thought it might have just been because my machine was aging. However, I loved the drive so much, I had recommended it to a friend a few weeks before my incident, and he bought one alongside his new TiBook 550. About a week after mine quit working, his did too (the drive starts up and sounds fine, but the machine won't recognize it, and then the drive can't be seen by any other firewire machines...it seems the drives firewire burns out also). We still didn't think it was the burner, so he brought over his machine and burner so we could see what was up. After giving up, I tried to put his machine in target disk mode, so I could just copy the files he needed to burn over to my machine to use my old SCSI burner, but now my functioning G3 couldn't see his Ti. I plugged my iPod into his Ti.....nothing. To make a long story short, I'm left with a firewireless G3, and formac claims I abused the warranty on the drive by misusing it (even though it says, in both the manual and the box it came in, bus power via firewire is supported), and refuse to fix what they have damaged. They claim they've never advertised or led on that this drive is to be bus powered, and that they've discontinued the whole buspowering feature because other companies have been having similar problems.....although, when I bought this burner, I bought it because it was advertised as bus powered, and I couldn't find ANY other manufacturers who sold a bus powered drive. I like to find the best deal, and I looked hard. Sorry for so much detail. Just let your reader beware of the problems we've had (on 2 out of 3 machines!), I'd hate for anyone else to go thru all of this, and lose any functionality.

Jesse

PS : I WANT A CUBE! You have a great site, and I read your site all the time. I'm saving for a Cube on ebay when the time is right. The Cube is by far the coolest machine ever made. Here's to hoping apple will bring them back....new and improved!

Hi, Just to let you know that I am using a Formac with my Cube for already 8 months and I didn't have any problems.

Jorge S

02/24/02

Another Cube cooling system.

Two days ago we posted an article about a "cooling station for the Cube". If you do not like that one, there is another one. This one is smaller (60mm x 32mm) and fits under the Cube. Is also made by a Japanese company.

02/23/02

Users gallery updated.

We have updated our Cube desktops gallery with two new pages (desks 6 and desks 7) sent by our users. If you want to do the same, please send us a mail. (you can also send us pictures of your iPods or from other Macs that you have on your desk. We'll publish them in a different gallery).

02/22/02

Cooling station for the Cube.

You Cube seems to need some extra cooling? Princeton, a Japanese company, has the solution : the PowerMac G4 Cube cooling station, also sold under the name Monroe Ice Cube. You have to put that station under your Cube. It has a fan and is also a USB hub. It is a cool idea, but if we had to use a fan with our Cube, we would use an internal one (yes Apple thought about that : there is room for one and there is also a fan power connector!).

02/04/02

Readers feedback about Dual G4 Cubes

Hi, I'm writing in reply to your quest for information about the dual g4 cubes. I also installed a dual 450 g4 board, which was ripped from a tower, in my Cube. It is a processor from a sawtooth g4. I had to solder an extension piece to the little induction coil so it could be in a flat position as opposed to it's regular upright position. Of course I had to add two little aluminum plates to the heatsink, to make the processor core get in contact with the heatsink. I used "arctic silver " paste for good thermal contact between the pieces. Basically you can find everything I did also on the xlr8yourmac.com site.

It works very nice ! Temperature is constantly at around 46°C . The highest temperature I had so far was 49°C after working on a big project in Logic Audio for 12 hours nonstop. I didn't experience any incompatibilities so far, neither with the system (X,9) nor with any other app. It's worth it, if you work with dual processor optimized applications or OSX most of the time, if not, don't waste the money, since there is no noticeable performance increase while working with normal apps.

Regards H.Marseille

Hello there, a friend of mine and my humble self have upgraded our g4 cubes with a Sonnet Encore/ST G4 Duet, each more than a month ago (refer to the cpu upgrade database on xlr8yourmac.com). Of course we were forced to equip the cubes with fans, in order to prevent them from overheating. Fortunately apple has forseen the possibility of mounting an 80mm fan at the bottom of the case, so this was no problem at all. However, this mod still was quite demanding, 'cause we had to disassemble our machines completely. Further we had to attach two aluminum plates below the heatspreader plate, to establish a physical contact between the cpus and the heatsink. The results, however were splendid, the Cubes have been working without any problems for more than a month now, performing outstandingly, especially in OS X with its full dual cpu support. The Cubes' CPUs still get quite warm (those in one of the machines around 65°c under 100% load) but they haven't failed us until now, and we don't expect them to do so in the future. Also the power consumption doesn't seem to be too high, because one of the Cubes has a Cinema Display attached and all of the three dimm-slots are occupied. Also there are always a lot of external devices connected to the firewire-ports.

P.S: both of us dig your site, we are hardcore cube-lovers and would like to submit our greetings to the worldwide community of apple and especially g4 Cube- fans!!!

Michael B

iSub and Cube, a following

Marco B has received an e-mail from Harman Kardon about the iSub and the Cube:

Hi Just in answer to your recent post about the iSubs new compatibility with the Cube (under OSX) I also wondered if there was a new type of iSub so I contacted Harman and they had this to say:

"Dear Mr. B, there is only one version of the iSub and it will work with the G4 cube as long as you are running OS 10.1 or above. However, the drivers for OS 10 are not as matured as OS 9. You may experience problems with OS 10.1.2. Apple developed all the drivers for the iSub and are integrated into the operating systems. On certain configurations the iSub might work with a USB hub, thought it is not recommended. Best Regards, Harman-Multimedia 877-266-6202"

Readers requests

Hi there, I was wondering if anybody else has experienced glitches/odd behaviour/crashes with their USB speakers plugged in to their studio display. These glitches always seemed to coincide with loud sounds being played (perhaps a power issue). I was able to solve this problem by plugging them directly into the Cube. Kieran H

There may be some glitches if you don't plug the speakers on one of the two USB ports of the Cube. It also depends on how many devices you have on your USB bus. You're right : it is a power issue.

Hi Cube-Zone, I have a (fairly stupid) question : How do I determine which graphics card I have in my Cube? The card itself says "Radeon," but the Apple System Profiler does not confirm this information. Any information you could provide me with will be appreciated. Thanks for the site! -Matthew

If it says "Radeon", there is no reason to believe it is not a Radeon. When it is an ATI 128, the Apple System profiler says that your video card only has 16 meg of RAM and is an ATI 128 (it is clearly written).

Hello, I heard a lot of rumours, that external FW-Burners (buspowered) destroy the mainboard quite often. I bought one of these (formac) and now wonder if this can happen. I don«t want my cube to be damaged. Thanks for tips. Kai, Germany

We have not heard anything about that. However, if one of our readers knows anything about that, we'll be happy to publish a feedback.

Hello, I've just read an article about the new Dual G4/1GHz and it says that it's the same [mother]board like before. Do you think the board will fit into the cube?? Sincerly yours, Boris

Unfortunately, no. It won't work. You can only use Gigabit ethernet PowerMacs processors or Sonnet duet cards. Both are unsupported.