I picked up five Power Mac G5s locally yesterday from FB Marketplace, with the intention of cleaning them up and moving them along to other vintage Mac enthusiasts and keeping one for myself. All of them boot, which is great and better than I expected. I do a lot of tinkering and upgrading with G4 Macs, but I haven't worked on or had a G5 since they were still current models. As such, I haven't really paid a whole lot of attention to the details and quirks of upgrading individual models over the years. Anyways, I'm hoping that more G5-savvy folks here might have a thought on something.
One of the Macs is an early 2005 dual processor 2GHz model which has been somewhat abused. Someone clearly started to strip it at some point and, although I have all of the fans for it, the plastic brackets that hold them in place and some of the fan power connectors are missing. I swapped those parts in from another machine to test it and it does boot. Unfortunately, this particular model is limited to 4GB of RAM due to only having 4 DIMM slots on the logic board. But I see that it has the through-board solder holes and even the markings for the other slots on the board which leads me to wonder if it could be as simple as soldering additional memory slots to the board and overcoming this limitation. I know there have been other, much older, Macs where this was sometimes the case, but has anyone ever tried this on a G5?
Of course, I know that this is a lot of work and not the most practical thing to do. But, given the condition of this particular machine, it isn't one that I am going to easily re-home and, with the RAM limitation overcome, would be a fun project machine for me to mess around with. The needed soldering is well within my skillset and I can find the sockets, but I'm not sure if there are other differences between the logic boards that I'm not considering. Thanks for any thoughts you might have!
One of the Macs is an early 2005 dual processor 2GHz model which has been somewhat abused. Someone clearly started to strip it at some point and, although I have all of the fans for it, the plastic brackets that hold them in place and some of the fan power connectors are missing. I swapped those parts in from another machine to test it and it does boot. Unfortunately, this particular model is limited to 4GB of RAM due to only having 4 DIMM slots on the logic board. But I see that it has the through-board solder holes and even the markings for the other slots on the board which leads me to wonder if it could be as simple as soldering additional memory slots to the board and overcoming this limitation. I know there have been other, much older, Macs where this was sometimes the case, but has anyone ever tried this on a G5?
Of course, I know that this is a lot of work and not the most practical thing to do. But, given the condition of this particular machine, it isn't one that I am going to easily re-home and, with the RAM limitation overcome, would be a fun project machine for me to mess around with. The needed soldering is well within my skillset and I can find the sockets, but I'm not sure if there are other differences between the logic boards that I'm not considering. Thanks for any thoughts you might have!
