Apple Airport "n" in PCIe G5

BJonson said:

So I added airport n to my G5. Check this out. I bought this mini pcie to pcie adapter card and put an apple airport card in it and it totally detected it and works perfect. Nice upgrade for anyone looking to add some faster wifi to their G5. Here is the link to the ebay auction for the adapter. Any pcie airport card will work. I used one from an old imac.

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What was your Airport card ID number or what year was your iMac from? I have a couple of 2007 Macbook airport cards spare with a G5 arriving tomorrow. I would be amazed if there were any PPC kexts in Leopard that supported those cards since they only were intended for Intel machines.

This would certainly be a cheaper and better option than trying to find an affordable Runway card to house the airport/BT module or putting up with *##$£*## Ralink drivers.

I actually have one of those adapters in one of my PCs that came out of a newer dell tower. It has some Atheros AR5B93 which I know SL supported out of the box no problems, once I get a DC G5 I'll be sure to try it out! I assume that the kext files in Leopard/Tiger were universal and worked for both processors.

this is looking intresting while i cant say much about intel mac wifi cards in PPC macs i know that the bluetooth card from a 2006 iMac works fine in my Power mac G4 MDD dual 1.42Ghz under 10.3.9 and 10.5.8 I do have the wifi card from a 2006 iMac but thats G only i belive so i dont think there would be eny difrence from the stock wifi cards in G5s and the last G4s

gavinstubbs09 said:

It has some Atheros AR5B93 which I know SL supported out of the box no problems, once I get a DC G5 I'll be sure to try it out! I assume that the kext files in Leopard/Tiger were universal and worked for both processors.

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Dunno. I seem to remember for draft-N cards that Apple stung us for £1.25 just to download the driver, ostensibly for Sarbanes Oxley accounting reasons. If SL supported it, there is a likelihood that drivers were only developed for Intel since that hardware probably only made it into Intel Macs, which is why I am curious about exactly which Apple 802.11n hardware had support with PPC kexts and why?

weckart said:

Dunno. I seem to remember for draft-N cards that Apple stung us for £1.25 just to download the driver, ostensibly for Sarbanes Oxley accounting reasons. If SL supported it, there is a likelihood that drivers were only developed for Intel since that hardware probably only made it into Intel Macs, which is why I am curious about exactly which Apple 802.11n hardware had support with PPC kexts and why?

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My MBP has a 802.11n card, however this Mac shipped with Leopard, so there is my idea of universal drivers. The 2007 iMacs IIRC have 802.11n cards and shipped with Tiger for a period of time. So who knows why it is semi-universal!

OK, can't hurt to try. I only see G rated 'Airport' cards on eBay intended for Powermacs but maybe a couple of the earlier draft-n cards may work in PPC hardware.

Picked up a stock 2002 Quicksilver (800Mhz) today with a full complement of install disks for a pittance. It came with a boxed 17" ADC Studio monitor thrown in all in VGC. Chuffed at what you can find at second hand shops these days.

I was going to flash a spare ATI 9500 Pro I had but the monitor is so nice it would be a shame to lose it as it only has an ADC connector. Hmm. Decisions.

weckart said:

OK, can't hurt to try. I only see G rated 'Airport' cards on eBay intended for Powermacs but maybe a couple of the earlier draft-n cards may work in PPC hardware.

Picked up a stock 2002 Quicksilver (800Mhz) today with a full complement of install disks for a pittance. It came with a boxed 17" ADC Studio monitor thrown in all in VGC. Chuffed at what you can find at second hand shops these days.

I was going to flash a spare ATI 9500 Pro I had but the monitor is so nice it would be a shame to lose it as it only has an ADC connector. Hmm. Decisions.

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Time to drop $75 on a ADC to DVI adapter

They go for more than that in the UK. If you can find one.

I found a stellar deal on mine, a store on ebay that would re-sell peoples stuff had mine for $50 buy it now with free shipping. You bet I jumped on that quite quickly!

Hmm. I only paid £25 for the QS + monitor altogether. If the monitor had been the 22" variety, I might have considered it.

If you are comfortable with soldering, you can build your own quite inexpensively.

My PCIe adapter arrived today and I tried my Macbook cards. Both were Atheros AR5008 cards. Threw those into my G5 running 10.5.8 and rebooted. The cards were listed in SysProfiler but no kexts were loaded.

I drilled down into IO80211Family.kext and checked. The Atheros driver was i386 only. Damn. I looked at the lonely Broadcom 4311 plug in kext and that was a universal driver with PPC code. According to what I could find, the BCM4311 was an b/g card only (Dell 1490 is the most common to be found on eBay).

I had a hunt around the house and found a netbook I had hackintoshed back in the day and had forgotten about. That had a Broadcom 4321 card in it which was recognised as an AirPort compatible card under Snow Leopard. I gave it a go. Success! I did not even need to edit the Info.plist to get it running.

For the curious, the card was a generic BCM94321MCP P3 REV 0A ver 6.7f. With only two aerial connectors on the card, I shall be limited to 150Mbps at 2.4Ghz, but that is enough for surfing.