chris2021 wrote on 2022-02-05, 00:54:

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.

Im not a huge fan of modern macs and anything past os 10.11 pisses me off. Its missing something that started disappearing after 10.6 that made osx so great to use. I will give the operating system credit for still being harder to screw up than windows. My mom has a 2016? macbook air and i hate the thing but i have to give it credit that she hasnt managed to break either the computer or the operating system yet. With windows it was like once or twice a year cause she would download dumb stuff and get viruses.

The Powermac G4s were grey, the G3 was the blue one. A G4 is definitely worth getting for a good price. Id pay up to 100 for one in really good condition. I just got a 2002 Mirrored drive doors model for 40 bucks and it came with the original keyboard and a 17 inch apple studio display. The older ones are slower but i would say more reliable. The later quicksilver and MDD models seem to be more difficult to keep running. They packed to much stuff into the old g3 case and they started to have heat problems. I dont use my quicksilver in the summer and i wont use my MDD in the summer either because i dont have air conditioning. The quicksilver did not appreciate being run in a 90 degree room and crashed after about 20 minutes. Apple did a far better job with the thermal design of the G5s and a well maintained one doesnt seem to care about the heat it just gets louder and keeps going instead of crashing.

Not all G4s were grey. My Sawtooth G4 is a dark metallic blue. Top and front that is, yes the sides are grey/silver.

What I really like about that case is the ease of access to the motherboard. Pull one lever, and the whole motherboard swings out of the case. I wish they had continued using that design.
What I don't like about it is the scarcity of USB ports. That was somewhat fixed with an add-on USB2 card (NEC chipset). It did not solve the lack of any front USB ports though.

But, I mean how easier can it get than this? 😀

Yup, dats the one. Like I said booberry 😀

You've gone and made them more popular then they already were. Now I'll never own 1 (or 2) again. I only paid 5$ each for the ones I did have.

stamasd wrote on 2022-02-05, 11:31:

Not all G4s were grey. My Sawtooth G4 is a dark metallic blue. Top and front that is, yes the sides are grey/silver.

Im a bit color blind, to me that is a dark grey color.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-02-05, 12:59:

Yup, dats the one. Like I said booberry 😀
You've gone and made them more popular then they already were. Now I'll never own 1 (or 2) again. I only paid 5$ each for the ones I did have.

I would only pay 100 for one in really good condition or that was otherwise somehow special. I paid 100 for my quicksilver but the case is in nearly mint condition. Almost no scratches and no gouges or random discolorations in the case. It also came with a Griffin Gport which replaces the modem with an old style 8 pin din apple serial port which is extremely rare and bumped up the value of the quicksilver considerably for me. Before anyone asks it does have a graphics card i just had to temporarily borrow it for my mdd.

So tell us why you love it and why.

I never really used them. All I remember is the unix like startup routine. Prior to that the only power Macs I played with were then7200/7500s. Unix based os was not a thing yet as I understand.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-02-05, 23:19:

So tell us why you love it and why.

I never really used them. All I remember is the unix l I me startup routine. Prior to that the only power Macs I played with were then7200/7500s. Unix based os was not a thing yet as I understand.

My first computer that i owned was a Toshiba satellite a135, a windows laptop with a core duo and windows vista. I saved up and bought it when i was in middle school. But at school we had macs, mostly imac g3s and emacs and i liked using those to, i was impressed with how they tolerated constant abuse from tech illiterate teachers and stupid angry kids and hardly ever crashed, the school had no air conditioning and the imacs had no fans and would still run perfectly fine on the 85-9o degree days. The operating sytems (10.3 and 10.4) felt fluid, intuitive and just nice to use even on those old imacs. So i saved up 100 dollars and bought a used powermac g3 blue and white around 2007. It had 10.4 tiger on it which ran extremely well despite the g3 only being 350 mhz, i used it all the way up until 2011 when it couldnt handle the internet anymore and itunes stopped being able to communicate with the itunes store properly or sync with my ipod touch. I unfortunately scrapped it as i was a stupid kid who just thought it was garbage but i never stopped liking those older macs. I started getting back into computers about 2 years ago when a co-worker gave me all the components from a 2003 alienware he was reusing the case from. It had a pentium 4 northwood 3ghz and an intel 875 motherboard. I built it into a different case and started using it to play old games on xp and caught the bug. Started buying old computers, at first mainly old windows boxes from the late p3-p4 era that i bought in bulk and scrapped mostly for parts. Cd/dvd drives, motherboards, processors and stuff. The motherboards mostly had bulged caps or were otherwise damaged or worthless and the cases mostly crap that i gave to a scrap metal guy. Once i had a few good systems and a hoard of parts to keep them running i slowed down and got more selective and also branched out into old macs. I also got into music, i have a guitar and a keyboard and i built a music rack using mostly old professional gear from the early 2000s i got for cheap. That old gear happens to work perfectly with old macs and os 10.4 tiger is far superior to xp or vista in terms of reliability and audio handling as well as audio software. These older macs are getting older and many of them had hard abusive lifes in schools and studios and what not. They arent always the most reliable so i like to have a few systems on hand as backups and also just to tinker with. The older ones from the early-mid g4 era and before can run the classic mac os. The classic mac os is flat out weird for someone not used to it and i spend most of my time in 10.4 tiger or sometimes 10.5 leopard when using an older mac. I find 10.4 tiger to be close to the perfect operating system and wish osx was still like that today. 10.5 is where it started to change and 10.6 was the last that really felt like the original osx. 10.11 el capitan is the last one i find tolerable to use and my moms macbook air with 10.15 catalina flat out pisses me off. Its to much like an iphone, its always giving you stupid notifications and the walled garden is just to walled in now. I use windows as my main modern system although i do have 2 macs that can run newer mac osx if i really need to. At this point i probably have about 50 operable systems counting laptops and working motherboards and a hoard of parts to keep them working. I have 10 that i really use on a regular basis and the rest are just for tinkering and wasting time with. I spend a lot of time benchmarking and overclocking systems, comparing processors and making spreadsheets with the results. I also game and have several systems dedicated to that.

Ah another fellow hoarder. 😀

stamasd wrote on 2022-02-06, 00:50:

Ah another fellow hoarder. 😀

Yes i am, and proud. I have a few reasons, partially because i like having a hoard to sit on like a dragon, and partially because if i get into a groove i dont want to have to deal with annoying hardware failures. If i want to do some audio work and the computer i was using wont cooperate i can just pull out another one with the same software and go right away. Same thing if i was playing a game and the computer wont cooperate, just grab a different one and fix the problem when im in a computer mood. I built a server out of a raspberry pi4 and some usb hard drives that i move all my projects and game saves to when im done at the end of the day so it really doesnt matter in the slightest which computer im using to do it.

An update to my plywood g5 project. I put my radeon 9800 pro in it, before it had an fx5200. The 9800 is a much needed improvement.

I was pondering how to view the graphics card temperature in osx. Temperature monitor does not show graphics card temp, at least not this card or the fx5200 that was in here before. I saw the temp entry for the drive bay sensor and remembered that its on a small pcb at the end of a long wire and controls the speed of the small grey fan above the pci slots. I stuck the sensor between the fins on the Radeon 9800s heat sink and now i can more or less view the heatsink temp through the drive bay sensor. I also re-angled the small grey fan controlled by that sensor to aim at the cards. I intend to put a sata card in it to since i have all the extra space for more drives compared to a stock G5 and that will help keep it cool as well as the graphics card. I will probably replace this small fan with a noctua or one of the spare G5 cpu exhaust fans i have as it gets extremely loud and whiny when the card heats up. It does a very good job of keeping the card cooler though. It should be even better when i put heatsinks on the memory chips. I was reading about 45 degrees on the card heatsink before i re-angled the fan and about 35 after with the sensor in the same position which is a very nice improvement. I also moved the DVD drive forward about 3 inches because the side of the case was blocking the tray and made it very awkward to insert a disk. This also made more room to angle the fan or install a bigger quieter one.

Does anyone have a recomendation for a cheap bootable sata controller. This is the 4 memory slot pci version of the G5 not the 8 slot pci-x version. I assume that means my card selection is basically the same as the G4?

I was looking through ancient forum posts on improving the radeon 9800 cooling and saw one person mention that the shim ring around the gpu was slightly to thick on some of the cards and prevented the heatsink from seating as well as it should on the die and that was partially responsible for the high numbers of heat related deaths of these cards. I pulled my card back out and pulled the heatsink off again and sure enough the layer of thermal paste left was quite a bit thicker than i like to see. I carefully removed the shim ring with a razorblade to cut the glue, like de-lidding an intel processor. I put a fresh dot of thermal paste on and reinstalled and removed the heatsink again and this time the layer was very thin and most of the thermal paste was pushed out from between the die and heatsink. I redid the thermal paste this time for good and put it back in the computer. The only real issue with this is since there are only 2 mounting points for the heatsink it could conceivably be mounted slightly crooked. This wont be an issue if you use an extremely tacky thermal paste like artic mx-5 and pay attention when you mount the heatsink. If you really want you could sand the shim ring down a bit and glue it back on for that extra layer of safety.

After spending this much time in the guts of a G5 my overwhelming thoughts are who the f--k designed this thing and why on earth did they do so many weird things that seem to be the opposite of good engineering and programming practice. I was screwing around with the fan and sensor positions, after i turned the computer on again the drive bay fan and only the drive bay fan was stuck at full speed. I spent 2 hours troubleshooting it including running the apple service diagnostics disk which just came back with a cryptic fan speed higher than expected for all the fans despite only one actually running at full speed. The problem turned out to be the tape covering the sensor for the clear plastic airflow door had shifted slightly and was not covering the sensor. Why this made only the one drive bay fan go insane and not the other 8 i have no idea. Even stupider if you unplug the sensor entirely the computer seems to think the door is in place and the fan/fans go back to normal speed. WTF.... who designs things like that. Then add in the U3 chip on the back of the board with that weird heatsink and the fan that sucks air through an incredibly poorly sealed duct meaning its never pulling as much air through the heatsink as it should while making more noise. There seems to be plenty of room on the front of the board. They could have put it on the front with a normal tower heatsink in the airflow path and it probably would have cooled better and been less noisy. On the plywood G5 i have the u3 fan blowing not sucking air and i sealed the duct with hot glue and i have never seen the u3 chip go over 51 degrees. It seems to me like the whole design of the computer could have been made more efficient and the programming of the error messages and the sensors definitely could have been better. I wonder why apple chose to and still chooses to design things like this, its just not good practice especially on a high end professional computer. I can find basically any older professional/business model dell and it will have error lights and beep codes and sensors that are properly designed and tell you what the problems actually are although dells have their own different set of issues.

You are not supposed to know, it's supposed to be an appliance, like a toaster, they give you a knob for an illusion of control but it burns the bread anyway.

mustagcoupe wrote on 2022-02-08, 22:13:

After spending this much time in the guts of a G5 my overwhelming thoughts are who the f--k designed this thing and why on earth did they do so many weird things that seem to be the opposite of good engineering and programming practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHG_qmQNVo

I was expecting that to be a Louis Rossman rant 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-09, 03:30:

I was expecting that to be a Louis Rossman rant 😁

Could just as eaisly been AVE with word wrangling.

Another minor update on the plywood G5. The front panel board i ordered came in. I dont have the original power button or connector so i had to make something. I used standard pc power buttons i had laying around, yes buttons plural. Sometimes i like to put a second one on the back of the computer so when im fumbling around back there i can turn the computer on without having to reach around to the front. I didn't have a white led so i used a green one like some of the g3 macs, which i glued to the front panel power button. I didn't have the original connector and i dont like soldering wires surface mount because its to easy to break them off so i cut and spliced into the appropriate wires in the harness and soldered it so it wont break. It all works perfectly, the green led breathes just like the original white one and everything. I need to figure out how i want to mount it still.

As i mentioned in a previous post i repurposed the original drive bay thermal sensor and 80mm fan to blow over the radeon 9800 and help keep it cool. The 80mm had a really annoying whine and didnt move that much air so i grabbed a spare 3 blade 92mm from a G5 front processor fan assembly. I cut the wires off the original 80mm at the fan hub and the connector off the 92mm and soldered them together so i have a longer wire.. The nice thing is the wires coming out of the motors are in the same positions on both fans so you dont need to figure out what they do, just connect them like for like. The 92mm is far more effective and does not have the same annoying whine as the 80mm. For now its zip tied to the optical drive but eventually i will add a sliding bracket of some kind so you can remove the fan like the other 2 in the front by just pulling it out.

I did finally get the graphics card power cable i needed to test the dual core 2.3 that the plywood g5 parts came with. Unfortunately at some point someone swapped the 2.3 for a 2.0. The serial on the machine says it came with a 2.3ghz. Im not sure if the seller swapped them himself and is trying to scam me or if he himself got scammed and didnt notice. Its quite a bit faster than the dual processor 1.8 in the plywood g5 but i dont have actual comparison numbers yet. Im very unhappy that it has a dc 2.0 though. If anyone has a dc 2.3 or a working 2.5 processor card from a quad they would sell me please pm me. I would very much like to upgrade it.

I finished benchmarking the 2.0 dual core g5. Here are my results of the plywood g5 plus a bunch of other random macs and a selection of random pcs from the same era and speed range in both Cinebench R10 and R11.5. I also added the results of my moden ryzen rig just for the lulz. I use those versions of cinebench because they run on both ppc and intel osx as well as windows as far back to 98 if its patched with kernelex. It seems to be a solid reliable cross platform processor benchmark. The scores between the processors types and speeds is around what id expect based on general usage and file unzipping performance. The plywood g5 is the one labeled 2x G5 970fx 1.8ghz. Sorry for the grainy quality.

Another minor update on the Plywood G5. I glued the front ports panel in place on the front bottom lip of the case, i may have to make a metal screw down bracket if the glue doesnt feel solid enough. Since i had to make my own power button as it wasnt included with the parts i decided to add a second one to go on the back. I removed the modem socket and cut it until i could recess the button all the way into it and glued the button in place. This way its securely mounted where i always know where it is and i can just plug it in and turn it on without reaching around to the front. I have some better plywood to make new sides and a top with but the weather isnt good enough to cut it right now. When the top is in place im going to mount this nice 2.5 inch quick change drive bay to the top rear of the case above the pci slots. I didnt put it in a pci slot like its supposed to go because it doesnt fit around the pci card support bracket i made and even if it did i dont want to loose a pci slot. This is great for me because i have a lot of small 80-160gb 2.5 inch sata drives i pulled from laptops i upgraded which are perfect for testing operating systems without messing with the main disks. I also ordered a sata card from china to flash for it so i can have up to 4 disks. If theres room next to the quick change bay i might add a small box to store two or three 2.5 inch drives. I need to get some chrome plastic caps for the power buttons so you cant see the glue or the cheap switches. Im going to make a front and back for it out of something like this diamond pattern metal mesh, I will cut and bend it to form recesses for the ports and power buttons.

I would like to upgrade the processors on the Plywood G5, Its a powermac 7,3 the 2004 revision. I have seen some indications that this isnt possible on the base models with only 4 ram slots. Does anyone know for sure, has anyone actually tried it. The early 05 powermac 7,3 used dual 2.0ghz on the same motherboard with 4 ram slots and regular pci so it must be possible on some level. If no one has tried it and no one can give me concrete answers id like to try it for myself. Does anyone know where i can get a set of 2 or 2.3ghz processors for a decent price.

Sorry for this plug (I am not affiliated). Very good deal on a dk blue G4, as long as you're near California:

Edit by Dominus: removed ebay link

What on earth does that have to do with this thread?