I asked about this earlier, but decided to give it a go myself. I bought a pci to pci-express adapter off ebay for 25$, and it uses the PEX8112 bridge chip. It has a 16x slot but it's really only 1x, not like that's going to be the bottleneck or anything, lol.
Of course the first thing i tried were video card. I tried a mac geforce 6600le in the slot on my powermac g4 sawtooth running sorbet leopard. It did boot with the 6600le and I got a picture, but as soon as it booted into osx the whole system locked up. I tried it in my powermac g5, and quicksilver g4 with the same results. I then tried it with linux in my g5, but the same thing happened after the boot menu. I tried a few other non macintosh cards with the g5 in linux but it either froze or just didn't boot with any of them. Not sure what's happening, but my uneducated guess is maybe the memory location the card is at doesn't line up with where osx thinks it is or the conversion chip goofs it up. It doesn't happen on a pc when i tried it.
Regrettably I didn't have that many other pci-express cards that weren't video cards. I tried a tempo esata card I had laying around, which didn't lock the system up, however osx tiger nor leopard had any idea what to do with it. If I can find a usb card I'll give that a go.
I next tried out a dual port intel gigabit ethernet card. Much to my surprise the card worked fine in my sawtooth! Well, it worked in sorbet leopard flawlessly, but in tiger the card wasn't detected. I tried to find some drivers for it but I didn't find much in that regard. This is of great interest to me because i've been wanting to get a gig card for my sawtooth as the 10/100 ethernet takes quite a while to download large files off my file server. It's not quite as fast as it would be on an actual pci-e slot- it averages about 200-300mb/s downloading things locally, and 40-50 mb/s over the internet(I have gig internet). I think i'll keep the card in there since it works so well! I did need to secure the card on the adapter with zip ties, but it works!
I did try the same cards on my B&W powermac G3, but the adapter nor anything connected to it was detected, so it looks like the oldest you can is the sawtooth g4's.
Just thought i'd share my experience with the adapter in case it is of any help to someone!
Of course the first thing i tried were video card. I tried a mac geforce 6600le in the slot on my powermac g4 sawtooth running sorbet leopard. It did boot with the 6600le and I got a picture, but as soon as it booted into osx the whole system locked up. I tried it in my powermac g5, and quicksilver g4 with the same results. I then tried it with linux in my g5, but the same thing happened after the boot menu. I tried a few other non macintosh cards with the g5 in linux but it either froze or just didn't boot with any of them. Not sure what's happening, but my uneducated guess is maybe the memory location the card is at doesn't line up with where osx thinks it is or the conversion chip goofs it up. It doesn't happen on a pc when i tried it.
Regrettably I didn't have that many other pci-express cards that weren't video cards. I tried a tempo esata card I had laying around, which didn't lock the system up, however osx tiger nor leopard had any idea what to do with it. If I can find a usb card I'll give that a go.
I next tried out a dual port intel gigabit ethernet card. Much to my surprise the card worked fine in my sawtooth! Well, it worked in sorbet leopard flawlessly, but in tiger the card wasn't detected. I tried to find some drivers for it but I didn't find much in that regard. This is of great interest to me because i've been wanting to get a gig card for my sawtooth as the 10/100 ethernet takes quite a while to download large files off my file server. It's not quite as fast as it would be on an actual pci-e slot- it averages about 200-300mb/s downloading things locally, and 40-50 mb/s over the internet(I have gig internet). I think i'll keep the card in there since it works so well! I did need to secure the card on the adapter with zip ties, but it works!
I did try the same cards on my B&W powermac G3, but the adapter nor anything connected to it was detected, so it looks like the oldest you can is the sawtooth g4's.
Just thought i'd share my experience with the adapter in case it is of any help to someone!
Last edited:
