Beige G3 ZIF CPU Upgrade cooling (heatpipe)
I came home from college for October break, and I decided I'd dig out my old mac. It was a 266MHz Beige G3, and a few years ago I bought an Interex XLR8 G4 ZIF processor for it. It ran happily at 450MHz as long as I had some strong active cooling on it. That was quite a mess, of course. I didn't have a blower fan and ducting, so I had to jury rig a case fan to blow on it, and that meant the case had to be open all the time.. It just wasn't very professional.

Anyway, this weekend I decided to revisit that. After some trial and error (all error) with various heatsinks I had lying around, I came across the broken evga 680i sli motherboard that I had replaced in my desktop. Of interest was the chipset cooler.. A large cooling fin assembly on one end of a heatpipe, with a heatsink on the other. I bent the heatpipe into a suitable shape, drilled holes in the case, and fastened it down. It idles at 32C and approaches 40C under load. The system bus is clocked at 83.3MHz, the CPU runs at 417MHz (a slight underclock), and the cache is set for a 2:1 ratio.

I've attached a picture of my setup.
-Alex

For other articles on Mac mods (cases, coolers, OC, etc.) see the Mac Systems page.