Power Mac G4 Cube Teardown
Teardown
Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions.
User-Contributed Guide
This guide is not managed by iFixit staff.
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The Infamous Powermac G4 Cube, apple's original failed attempt at a compact G4-Based Macintosh. Released in 2000 at a cost of $1599, the cube was considered too expensive, and too slow. The Cube Unlike many other computer's uses passive cooling, where there is no fan. This was a big mistake on apple's part, because G4 processors run very hot!
The Cube boasted a 450MHz or 500Mhz G4 CPU, not very fast, back then, they had 1Ghz Pentium III's The cube is virtually silent, except for the original 5400 RPM hard drives, After one year of production, Apple put the cube "On Ice." The Cube is also a popular candidate for macquariums, it also has an internal fan hookup, but it isn't used by Apple. If you want, you can buy a fan, and connect it to the 12V 2-Pin connector, and find somewhere to put it in the cube, this is a popular mod to cool overheating cubes.
It was replaced by the Mac Mini in 2005, 5 years later. At a later time, I will re-post this as a repair guide.
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Edit Step 4 ¶
Removing the Ram
Start by fliping the cube so that the side with the graphics card is faceing you, you may want to push the handle back in.
There are 3 RAM Slots, they are Standard PC100 Ram. The cube can support up to 1.5GB of ram, that's a 512MB Stick In All 3 Slots.
Remove the ram, just like any other kind of ram.
Edit Step 6 ¶
The Graphics Card
The Cube came standard with a Mac ATI 3D Rage 16MB AGP Card.
there are few cube compatible mac cards, due to the cube's small size, here are a few compatible cards: ATI 3D Rage (Mac Edition) 16MB AGP, NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 32MB AGP(Mac Edition)
The Cube Graphics card is hard to remove, follow these steps.
Remove these T10 screws:
Then, pull the top piece of metal off of the computer,
There is a small fragile cable coming from the top if the cube for the power button/LED, before fully removing the piece, unplug this cable from the logic board.
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