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What "socket" does the PPC 970 have?
- Thread starter rabidz7
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It concerns me deeply - both the question, and that you believe that it is some sort of socketed CPU.
If you can replace them without soldering, then it is a socket. The socket must obviously different between some models, or a 2003 power mac would be upgradeable to a late 2005.
That is not correct. They have a different bootrom that works only with the same type of CPU.
OpenFirmware is in the bootrom. The bootrom loads before OpenFirmware. It is not something that can be changed without physically swapping two chips on the logicboard by soldering them.
A motherboard flash would not solve this issue?
Not saying it would be easy, just in theory.
You'd still have the problem of the socket mismatch. And a flash won't work. Apple never released a tool for it or a blank state bootrom for the G5.
It resets OpenFirmware. The bootrom is read only, except to Apple's special tools. Apple has never released any bootrom updates for a G5, thus there is no way to reset or write a bootrom on a G5. Resetting the NVRAM/PRAM is not flashing the logicboard because the bootrom is not erased and overwritten with new programming from a source.
I think you'd have troubles resetting NVRAM on a PowerPC Mac.
If you were to reset the PRAM, that doesn't change the compatibility of the BootROM. It does nothing to it.
It isn't that hard to reset the NVRAM on a PowerPC machine. Just press and hold Command-Option-P-R at boot and wait for the second chime. Or boot into OpenFirmware and enter the commands reset-nvram and reset-all to reset it.
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