Ahh I didn't think about shipping. Fair point. But swapping a mobo is not hard, I did it in about 45 mins and that was working at a leisurely pace.
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G5 CPU Upgrade
- Thread starter SuperKerem
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I just wanted to let everyone know that, yes, it is possible to upgrade a late 2005 G5 CPU module. I actually created a unique model of G5 by swapping out a 2.0 GHz stock module for a 2.5 GHz module from a broken G5 quad. The air cooler in that machine is massive, so it keeps up fine with the 2.5 GHz CPU's cooling needs. I hunted down a DMG of the Apple Hardware Test CD just in case it would be needed, but it was not! The Mac simply chimed to life and booted up to its installed Leopard system without a hitch.
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Nice work. I took a slightly different approach and took the heatsink/fans etc. out of a 2.0 and put them in a dual 2.7 after ditching the watercooling kit which was leaking and nasty. The CPUs do not overheat so I don't know why Apple felt the watercooling was necessary? Obviously the 4x 2.5ghz will put out much more heat but the dual 2.7 is fine.
Looking at the size of the air cooler for just the single dual core CPU, I figure they must have thought that there wasn't enough room available in the case to air cool two discrete CPUs. I hear that the late 2005 water cooling is more reliable than the older versions, though. I know my dead quad's water cooling never leaked.
Not if it is like my 2.0 GHz, because there was no second CPU socket mounted on the board. The two big metal pins to either side of it were also not present. You could tell the board had the potential to be a full quad core motherboard, but they just left those things off in the manufacturing process.
The 2003 2.0GHz was a dual CPU configuration. Perhaps you're thinking of the 2005 2.0GHz model?
Oh, yes. Guess I didn't read that carefully enough.
It is a very good question. Since those earlier machines are so different architecturally (DDR, not DDR2, and PCI-X rather than PCIe, older model of G5 CPU, etc.), I imagine the chances of that working are nil.
How about the following situation?
Say, you could get a PM quad, late 2005, with damaged LCS, so the CPUs are toast. With the dual sockets, could you then put two 2.3 or 2.0 GHz chips in and make it an air-cooled unit with the heatsinks from 2.0 or 2.3 dual-core units? How reliable would this be over the liquid-cooled 2.5 system? Why didn't Apple try this out and see if they could flesh out the lineup of quad-core G5 units as they did with the first Mac Pros? IIrc, the first CMP was marketed as having the power of a quad-core G5 in every model, of which it most certainly did... Until people started upgrading them to 2,1 firmware and shoving X5365 chips inside to get an 8-core machine, all aircooled and still running hotter than the G5 systems, (FB-DIMM memory in a workstation style tower is miserable)...
Say, you could get a PM quad, late 2005, with damaged LCS, so the CPUs are toast. With the dual sockets, could you then put two 2.3 or 2.0 GHz chips in and make it an air-cooled unit with the heatsinks from 2.0 or 2.3 dual-core units? How reliable would this be over the liquid-cooled 2.5 system? Why didn't Apple try this out and see if they could flesh out the lineup of quad-core G5 units as they did with the first Mac Pros? IIrc, the first CMP was marketed as having the power of a quad-core G5 in every model, of which it most certainly did... Until people started upgrading them to 2,1 firmware and shoving X5365 chips inside to get an 8-core machine, all aircooled and still running hotter than the G5 systems, (FB-DIMM memory in a workstation style tower is miserable)...
