mustagcoupe wrote on 2022-02-02, 02:04:

I bought a 2005 power mac g5 2.3 dc the other day and it included a pile of parts that used to be a mid 2004 dual 1.8ghz g5. I assembled the parts and powered it on and it seemed to work so i started wondering how i could make use of it. I decided to attempt to build a custom under monitor desktop style case for it out of plywood and assorted other junk i had laying around. Fortunately all of the standoffs as well as the plastic air channel for the chip on the back of the board were in the box of parts i got. I superglued all of the standoffs in the correct positions to a sheet of plywood, fitted the plastic air channel over the standoffs and drilled holes to permanently fix it to the plywood. Since i did not trust the superglue to hold the full weight of the computer should it get bumped or something there is also a sheetrock screw going into the plywood through a spare hole in roughly every corner to make sure it can't fall off. I re used the blower fan that originally cooled the chip on the back of the board to do the same thing but in reverse. It now blows air in from the top and out the front as that was the easiest way to make it fit with what i had laying around. I used the bottom of a plastic rubbing alcohol bottle to channel the air from the fan through the duct and hot glued it in place to seal it. I bolted the power supply to another sheet of plywood and attached it to the bottom piece using L brackets and bolts. The DVD drive, hard drive and the original hard drive cooling fan are bolted to another piece of plywood on the opposite side from the power supply using the same L brackets and some zip ties. The processors are currently held down with some long sheetrock screws just to keep them from falling out as i was unable to reuse the original heat sink bolts. I will try to come up with something better using springs to allow for heat expansion next time i go to the hardware store. It seems to be working just fine, i was able to install leopard for testing no problem. It is very loud at the moment as i have not had a chance to see if it will calibrate yet. When the weather is warmer i will probably coat the outside of the plywood in polyurethane spar varnish to protect it and make it look nice. I may also replace the sides and top with much nicer plywood in the future as this is some very cheap stuff i had laying around in my garage.

Nice!

For some reason, I want to call it a Fleetwood Mac(intosh). 😉

Thats funny. I was thinking either the woodgrain g5 as an LGR tribute or power crap g5 because its made of crap. It passed thermal calibration. It runs damn near silently now, i can easily hear the hard drive over the rest of the computer. Its running flawlessly. I repasted both g5 chips and the northbridge chip on the back of the board with artic mx-5 and i have yet to see the temp on any of the chips go over 60 degrees even while running cinebench r10. It scored 1377 points on 1 core and 2486 points 2 core running mac os tiger if anyone is interested. My plan for its future is to install leopard on a second partion on the same hard drive that tiger is on, then start messing with linux for power pc on another hard drive cause swapping them is so easy on this thing. I also have a set of the original 130nm g5 chips from a slightly older g5 that should work in this which has the 90 nm 970fx g5's. I will probably test those out at some point as it will also allow me to force install the special build of os 10.2.7 for the 2003 g5.

Good luck with Linux. I just spent a week trying to get Gentoo installed on a G5 (2004 dual 1.8 ), I got it all set eventually only to stumble upon bootloader (you have to use yaboot) not being actually able to boot anything. Now when I want to get to OSX I have to go through OpenFirmware. 😁

Watch out for termites

Need to go for this style 😁

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-1-w … could-be-yours/

stamasd wrote on 2022-02-02, 17:55:

Good luck with Linux. I just spent a week trying to get Gentoo installed on a G5 (2004 dual 1.8 ), I got it all set eventually only to stumble upon bootloader (you have to use yaboot) not being actually able to boot anything. Now when I want to get to OSX I have to go through OpenFirmware. 😁

Yeah i have seen videos and threads indicating that its not always an easy or fast thing to do. Luckily i have plenty of spare time at the moment and this thing is extremely easy to take apart. 4 screws and a couple of wires and i can have both sides with the power supply and drives off with total access to all 4 sides of the motherboard. Since the box of parts had both the original 130nm g5 as well as the later 90nm g5 and this machine should support both i want to do some testing. It doesnt seem like anyone has actually done serious testing to see how much if any hotter the 130nm g5 runs and if there are any performance differences. The original 130nm g5s also support the special g5 version of mac os 10.2.7 which supposedly will kernel panic with the 90nm cpus so i can test that out to.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-02, 18:06:

Need to go for this style 😁

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-1-w … could-be-yours/

Unfortunately even that is beyond my woodworking skills. Im much better at metal work and computers than woodwork. My dad is the woodworking guy, id have to ask him to help me and its not a huge priority. I will probably make nicer sides as well as a top out of nicer plywood when its warmer and coat it with polyurethane spar varnish though. Right now its just a proof of concept using cheap crappy plywood. I did not expect it to work as well as it does. It somehow passed thermal calibration and runs almost silently despite the fact that it does not even have a top or any kind of air guide over the processors yet.

Small update to the Plywood G5 project. I added a frame for the video and pci cards to bolt to before i accidentally break them. Its nice and solid now and helps support the rear fans. I also stopped at the hardware store and got some proper wood screws and some springs to hold the processors down and allow for some flex. Before they were solid mounted with sheetrock screws. In retrospect i wish i had chosen springs with a lighter clamping pressure as i cant screw the screws into the wood as much as i would like without an uncomfortable amount of flex in the processor daughter card. I might buy another set of lighter springs and swap them out again in the future. It works for now though, the processors can move a bit when they heat up and cool down but they cant fall out.

Now you only need to finish the exterior with a few layers of shellac. 😀

Or I can give you my recipe for "violin varnish".

Congratulations on finding a use for something post purchase. Hey you never know.

stamasd wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:04:

Now you only need to finish the exterior with a few layers of shellac. 😀

Or I can give you my recipe for "violin varnish".

Im planning to make new sides for it as well as a top out of higher quality plywood and coat it in polyurethane spar varnish to match my music rack. Right now its to cold and plywood is to expensive to do that but i definitely will in the future. not sure what im going to do about the front and back but im thinking something like metal stuco lath if i can find some thats not overly sharp. If not that than something similar. I plan to keep it somewhat crudely built but not so crude as to be ugly. I want it to be something that would cause steve jobs and jony ive to kill me if they saw it.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:19:

Congratulations on finding a use for something post purchase. Hey you never know.

Ironically i got the pile of parts working faster than the complete 2005 2.3 dual core g5 they came with. The 2005 did not come with a video card or memory. I put some memory in it and it bongs when i turn it on so im pretty sure it works but im waiting for the 6 pin power cable i need for the video card i bought for it to come in so i can see if it actually works.

FWIW, the best video card I've found working for this G5 is a Radeon 9500 - I have one that was originally a PC card, and flashed it with a Mac BIOS. Works like a charm. FWIW, you need to flash it under pure MacOS 9, so you need a separate computer (G4 or earlier) with AGP slot for that. I used a Sawtooth G4 with OS 9.2

stamasd wrote on 2022-02-04, 10:49:

FWIW, the best video card I've found working for this G5 is a Radeon 9500 - I have one that was originally a PC card, and flashed it with a Mac BIOS. Works like a charm. FWIW, you need to flash it under pure MacOS 9, so you need a separate computer (G4 or earlier) with AGP slot for that. I used a Sawtooth G4 with OS 9.2

Are you talking about the plywood g5 or the late 05 thats missing its video card. The late 05 is PCIe only and i already grabbed and flashed an x1900 for it. For the plywood one right now it has a G5 geforce fx 5200 in it. I have a radeon 9800 in my other agp g5 that i plan on putting into the plywood g5 but i dont want to risk it getting broken until im done messing with the plywood g5. I actually just ordered a radeon 9650 that im going to attempt to get working in a mdd g4 but thats getting a bit off topic.

Ive been doing some testing and benchmarking as i usually do and im honestly surprised at how poor the G5 is in terms of performance per watt. A 1.8ghz g5 seems roughly equivalent to a 2.4ghz northwood pentium 4 core for core and the g5 seems to run considerably hotter. I have a dell precision 670 with dual 3.8ghz prescott based xeons and that thing just screams, it can rival the early core 2s and kicks the hell out of the g5 in terms of raw processing power and general speed. Admittedly the xeons are 2ghz faster than the 1.8ghz G5 but they don't really run much if any hotter and have far more processing power. Im sure the 2.3ghz dual core g5 will be better when im able to test it but the dual xeons will probably still crush it. I wonder how the quad G5 would compare to the dual xeons, has anybody here ever run Cinebench R10 or R11.5 on a well maintained G5 quad. I usually do most of my testing in Cinebench R10, R11.5 or R20. It seems to give a fairly accurate and fair cross platform score and the older versions will run on pc as well as both intel and ppc macs. Ive also done some general OS testing like unzipping files and comparing times to make sure cinebench is giving reasonable results.

Yeah I'm not impressed with the dual G5-1.8 either. Takes about 6h to compile a recent Linux kernel. And that's with multithreaded compiling.

Were the G5s exclusively dual lga771? Prices on the G5's in the NY/NJ area had come down a lot several years ago. Really wanted 1, but when I realized they were similarly equipped to a homemade server box I already had, I lost interest. They're pretty underpowered for any current real world tasks. Strangely though I'd like to get my hands on a G4 tower. I had to blueberry? units a long time ago.

Come to think of it the G5s spanned the transition from ppc to intel micros. Unless I'm mistaken.

G3 thru G5 uses non-standard sockets with small daughterboard for cache and CPU or on a daughterboards either single or dual.

Cheers,

OK I'm utilizing incorrect terminology. A G5 obviously denotes a ppc chip. But some version of the anodized aluminum towers had dualintel xeon socket 771 chips, no?

771 is socket type and that is Xeon utilize this socket, and Apple don't mention socket type, just Xeon just to be clear.

Cheers,

chris2021 wrote on 2022-02-04, 22:24:

OK I'm utilizing incorrect terminology. A G5 obviously denotes a ppc chip. But some version of the anodized aluminum towers had dualintel xeon socket 771 chips, no?

You are thinking of the 2006-2008 mac pro. I personally would not bother buying one. I have experience with 2x 2008s and both are total pieces of crap. extremely picky about what outlets they're plugged into and they take that horrible fb-dimm memory that runs insanely hot and dies all the time. If you want a mac pro get a 2009-2012 model with the core i series xeons. Those are far better and take regular ddr3 memory that doesnt run so insanely hot. but they hold their value a bit better so your looking at a higher cost.

I no longer have any desire to own anything other then a cheaply had blueberry? G4. I know all about ddr2 server memory and how hot it runs. No desire to run a semi modern Mac, anyone that pays that kind of money is unhinged IMHO. I'll never understand the need to run a mac once they started using intel. I'll always have a soft spot for the early Macs, in particular the Mac II line and the Lisa/Mac XL. These days you have to spend 1000$+ easily and have something the size of a netbook.

So my interests in Macs is strictly nostalgic. The newer models are a farce to me.