Plywood G5 build

[mustagcoupe]

Minor update on the plywood g5 project. It now has a radeon 9800 instead of the fx5200 that was in it. I need to sand the card support bar a little thinner to be able to plug in the vga but thats not a big deal.

Does anyone know if theres a way to keep an eye on the cards temperature from osx or do i have to use the old touch the heatsink with a finger method. Its a flashed pc card with a reduced rom if that makes any difference.

 

[Bandaman]

This is cool, creative, and anxiety-inducing.

 

[mustagcoupe]

This is cool, creative, and anxiety-inducing.

I agree with anxiety inducing. I badly need to make a top for it so nothing can fall in. That radeon 9800 is in mint condition and i DO NOT want to break it. I hear these cards are extremely prone to heat related death which is why its in a g5 and not one of my g4s. I still need to add small heatsinks to the memory chips.

 

[mustagcoupe]

I was pondering how to view the graphics card temperature in osx. Temperature monitor does not show graphics card temp, at least not this card or the fx5200 that was in here before. I saw the temp entry for the drive bay sensor and remembered that its on a small pcb at the end of a long wire and controls the speed of the small grey fan above the pci slots. I stuck the sensor between the fins on the Radeon 9800s heat sink and now i can more or less view the heatsink temp through the drive bay sensor. I also re-angled the small grey fan controlled by that sensor to aim at the cards. I intend to put a sata card in it to since i have all the extra space for more drives compared to a stock G5 and that will help keep it cool as well as the graphics card. I will probably replace this small fan with a noctua or one of the spare G5 cpu exhaust fans i have as it gets extremely loud and whiny when the card heats up. It does a very good job of keeping the card cooler though. It should be even better when i put heatsinks on the memory chips. I was reading about 45 degrees on the card heatsink before i re-angled the fan and about 35 after with the sensor in the same position which is a very nice improvement. I also moved the DVD drive forward about 3 inches because the side of the case was blocking the tray and made it very awkward to insert a disk. This also made more room to angle the fan or install a bigger quieter one.

Does anyone have a recomendation for a cheap bootable sata controller. This is the 4 memory slot pci version of the G5 not the 8 slot pci-x version. I assume that means my card selection is basically the same as the G4?

I was looking through ancient forum posts on improving the radeon 9800 cooling and saw one person mention that the shim ring around the gpu was slightly to thick on some of the cards and prevented the heatsink from seating as well as it should on the die and that was partially responsible for the high numbers of heat related deaths of these cards. I pulled my card back out and pulled the heatsink off again and sure enough the layer of thermal paste left was quite a bit thicker than i like to see. I carefully removed the shim ring with a razorblade to cut the glue, like de-lidding an intel processor. I put a fresh dot of thermal paste on and reinstalled and removed the heatsink again and this time the layer was very thin and most of the thermal paste was pushed out from between the die and heatsink. I redid the thermal paste this time for good and put it back in the computer. The only real issue with this is since there are only 2 mounting points for the heatsink it could conceivably be mounted slightly crooked. This wont be an issue if you use an extremely tacky thermal paste like artic mx-5 and pay attention when you mount the heatsink. If you really want you could sand the shim ring down a bit and glue it back on for that extra layer of safety.

 

[mustagcoupe]

After spending this much time in the guts of a G5 my overwhelming thoughts are who the **** designed this thing and why on earth did they do so many weird things that seem to be the opposite of good engineering and programming practice. I was screwing around with the fan and sensor positions, after i turned the computer on again the drive bay fan and only the drive bay fan was stuck at full speed. I spent 2 hours troubleshooting it including running the apple service diagnostics disk which just came back with a cryptic fan speed higher than expected for all the fans despite only one actually running at full speed. The problem turned out to be the tape covering the sensor for the clear plastic airflow door had shifted slightly and was not covering the sensor. Why this made only the one drive bay fan go insane and not the other 8 i have no idea. Even stupider if you unplug the sensor entirely the computer seems to think the door is in place and the fan/fans go back to normal speed. WTF.... who designs things like that. Then add in the U3 chip on the back of the board with that weird heatsink and the fan that sucks air through an incredibly poorly sealed duct meaning its never pulling as much air through the heatsink as it should while making more noise. There seems to be plenty of room on the front of the board. They could have put it on the front with a normal tower heatsink in the airflow path and it probably would have cooled better and been less noisy. On the plywood G5 i have the u3 fan blowing not sucking air and i sealed the duct with hot glue and i have never seen the u3 chip go over 51 degrees. It seems to me like the whole design of the computer could have been made more efficient and the programming of the error messages and the sensors definitely could have been better. I wonder why apple chose to and still chooses to design things like this, its just not good practice especially on a high end professional computer. I can find basically any older professional/business model dell and it will have error lights and beep codes and sensors that are properly designed and tell you what the problems actually are although dells have their own different set of issues.

 

[mustagcoupe]

Another minor update on the plywood G5. The front panel board i ordered came in. I dont have the original power button or connector so i had to make something. I used standard pc power buttons i had laying around, yes buttons plural. Sometimes i like to put a second one on the back of the computer so when im fumbling around back there i can turn the computer on without having to reach around to the front. I didn't have a white led so i used a green one like some of the g3 macs, which i glued to the front panel power button. I didn't have the original connector and i dont like soldering wires surface mount because its to easy to break them off so i cut and spliced into the appropriate wires in the harness and soldered it so it wont break. It all works perfectly, the green led breathes just like the original white one and everything. I need to figure out how i want to mount it still.

As i mentioned in a previous post i repurposed the original drive bay thermal sensor and 80mm fan to blow over the radeon 9800 and help keep it cool. The 80mm had a really annoying whine and didnt move that much air so i grabbed a spare 3 blade 92mm from a G5 front processor fan assembly. I cut the wires off the original 80mm at the fan hub and the connector off the 92mm and soldered them together so i have a longer wire.. The nice thing is the wires coming out of the motors are in the same positions on both fans so you dont need to figure out what they do, just connect them like for like. The 92mm is far more effective and does not have the same annoying whine as the 80mm. For now its zip tied to the optical drive but eventually i will add a sliding bracket of some kind so you can remove the fan like the other 2 in the front by just pulling it out.

I did finally get the graphics card power cable i needed to test the dual core 2.3 that the plywood g5 parts came with. Unfortunately at some point someone swapped the 2.3 for a 2.0. The serial on the machine says it came with a 2.3ghz. Im not sure if the seller swapped them himself and is trying to scam me or if he himself got scammed and didnt notice. Its quite a bit faster than the dual processor 1.8 but i dont have actual comparison numbers yet. Im very unhappy that it has a dc 2.0 though. If anyone has a dc 2.3 or a working 2.5 processor card from a quad they would sell me please pm me. I would very much like to upgrade it.

 

[velocityg4]

Another minor update on the plywood G5. The front panel board i ordered came in. I dont have the original power button or connector so i had to make something. I used standard pc power buttons i had laying around, yes buttons plural. Sometimes i like to put a second one on the back of the computer so when im fumbling around back there i can turn the computer on without having to reach around to the front. I didn't have a white led so i used a green one like some of the g3 macs, which i glued to the front panel power button. I didn't have the original connector and i dont like soldering wires surface mount because its to easy to break them off so i cut and spliced into the appropriate wires in the harness and soldered it so it wont break. It all works perfectly, the green led breathes just like the original white one and everything. I need to figure out how i want to mount it still.

As i mentioned in a previous post i repurposed the original drive bay thermal sensor and 80mm fan to blow over the radeon 9800 and help keep it cool. The 80mm had a really annoying whine and didnt move that much air so i grabbed a spare 3 blade 92mm from a G5 front processor fan assembly. I cut the wires off the original 80mm at the fan hub and the connector off the 92mm and soldered them together so i have a longer wire.. The nice thing is the wires coming out of the motors are in the same positions on both fans so you dont need to figure out what they do, just connect them like for like. The 92mm is far more effective and does not have the same annoying whine as the 80mm. For now its zip tied to the optical drive but eventually i will add a sliding bracket of some kind so you can remove the fan like the other 2 in the front by just pulling it out.

I did finally get the graphics card power cable i needed to test the dual core 2.3 that the plywood g5 parts came with. Unfortunately at some point someone swapped the 2.3 for a 2.0. The serial on the machine says it came with a 2.3ghz. Im not sure if the seller swapped them himself and is trying to scam me or if he himself got scammed and didnt notice. Its quite a bit faster than the dual processor 1.8 but i dont have actual comparison numbers yet. Im very unhappy that it has a dc 2.0 though. If anyone has a dc 2.3 or a working 2.5 processor card from a quad they would sell me please pm me. I would very much like to upgrade it.

View attachment 1957183View attachment 1957184

Pretty cool. You've got all sorts of options for a momentary switch. You could go with a comedic sized, big, red emergency stop button.

 

[mustagcoupe]

Pretty cool. You've got all sorts of options for a momentary switch. You could go with a comedic sized, big, red emergency stop button.

Thats a neat idea. It would be sweet on something like an xserve rack so you can smack the big button and have it spool up like starting a jet. You could even do it without permanent mods by soldering temporary jumpers to the power button on the xserve and mounting the start button to the server rack frame. If you had multiple you could use relays to start more than one at once or in a sequence. But the main focus on this computer is building a fully functioning powermac g5 out of scrapped parts and literal garbage i found in my garage. A giant power button just doesnt fit the theme im going for with this build.

I forgot to mention in the earlier post, i also ordered a sata card to flash for the plywood G5. Its on its way from china. I also put a factory Bluetooth module in it just cause i had it laying around.

 

[mustagcoupe]

I finished benchmarking the 2.0 dual core g5. Here are my results of the plywood g5 plus a bunch of other random macs and a selection of random pcs from the same era and speed range in both Cinebench R10 and R11.5. I also added the results of my moden ryzen rig just for the lulz. I use those versions of cinebench because they run on both ppc and intel osx as well as windows as far back to 98 if its patched with kernelex. It seems to be a solid reliable cross platform processor benchmark. The scores between the processors types and speeds is around what id expect based on general usage and file unzipping performance. The plywood g5 is the one labeled 2x G5 970fx 1.8ghz. Sorry for the grainy quality.

 

[mustagcoupe]

Another minor update on the Plywood G5. I glued the front ports panel in place on the front bottom lip of the case, i may have to make a metal screw down bracket if the glue doesnt feel solid enough. Since i had to make my own power button as it wasnt included with the parts i decided to add a second one to go on the back. I removed the modem socket and cut it until i could recess the button all the way into it and glued the button in place. This way its securely mounted where i always know where it is and i can just plug it in and turn it on without reaching around to the front. I have some better plywood to make new sides and a top with but the weather isnt good enough to cut it right now. When the top is in place im going to mount this nice 2.5 inch quick change drive bay to the top rear of the case above the pci slots. I didnt put it in a pci slot like its supposed to go because it doesnt fit around the pci card support bracket i made and even if it did i dont want to loose a pci slot. This is great for me because i have a lot of small 80-160gb 2.5 inch sata drives i pulled from laptops i upgraded which are perfect for testing operating systems without messing with the main disks. I also ordered a sata card from china to flash for it so i can have up to 4 disks. If theres room next to the quick change bay i might add a small box to store two or three 2.5 inch drives. I need to get some chrome plastic caps for the power buttons so you cant see the glue or the cheap switches. Im going to make a front and back for it out of something like this diamond pattern metal mesh, I will cut and bend it to form recesses for the ports and power buttons.

 

[mustagcoupe]

I would like to upgrade the processors on the Plywood G5, Its a powermac 7,3 the 2004 revision. I have seen some indications that this isnt possible on the base models with only 4 ram slots. Does anyone know for sure, has anyone actually tried it. The early 05 powermac 7,3 used dual 2.0ghz on the same motherboard with 4 ram slots and regular pci so it must be possible on some level. If no one has tried it and no one can give me concrete answers id like to try it for myself. Does anyone know where i can get a set of 2 or 2.3ghz processors for a decent price.

 

[mustagcoupe]

I finally got around to making the new sides and top for the plywood G5. When the weather warms up i will coat the plywood in polyurethane spar varnish exactly like my plywood music rack that its sitting on. I used aluminum angle iron for the corner pieces, its strong, easy to drill and looks good. I need to buy a countersink bit so i can make the bolts on the bottom corners fit better in the angle iron and make a few tweaks to general fit and finish. The top is held on with screws instead of bolts for easy access and because it didnt need as much strength. Its pretty solid as is, i wouldnt put a 50 pound crt on it but a flat panel and a keyboard will be fine, i might add some reinforcements though. The top fits down onto the sides and comes off with 5 screws, its a slight interference fit so it doesnt move around even without the screws. I flashed a sil3112 sata card for it so i can have 4 hard drives. I plan to put an ssd in it as the boot drive when i get around to buying one, then the current boot drive will probably become a scratch drive attached to the sil 3112. The other onboard sata is connected to a quick change drive bay that was originally meant to go in a pci slot. I wanted the quick change bay because i have a bunch of small capacity laptop drives that i pulled from old laptops. I can load each one up with a different linux or something and swap them in and out as needed. Then i still have one more spare port on the sil 3112, im not sure what im going to use it for, maybe esata. I have space for one more pci card as well that i would like to fill with something at some point. I could put a usb card in it but i dont really need more usb, same for firewire and wifi. I dont know what i would put in it so maybe ill just leave it empty.

 

[mustagcoupe]

I would like to try to recompile the G5 version of osx 10.2 with the cpu check removed so it will boot on the 970fx cpus. Can anyone point me in the right direction to accomplish this, i cant really find anything in a google search.

 

[Macbookprodude]

See my other post. Assume, Jaguar is written in Assembly language, you need a disassembler to see the code. Or, I am sure someone on the dark web might have the source code there. Really, I don't think Apple would care about Jaguar source code, and frankly the kids there at Apple no NOTHING about PowerPC and PPC Mac OS X OS'es to really care. So, if it is written in Apple Assembly, you need to disassemble the OS and then rewrite it.

 

[mustagcoupe]

Another update on the plywood G5. I found a dual processor 2.7ghz G5 for sale locally. I was able to get it for 25 bucks as it was listed as broken. It came with 2gb of ram and either a radeon 9600 or 9650, case says 9650 but the card looks like a 9600. The liquid cooler had leaked heavily but fortunately the computer was kept upright and it failed at the hoses first rather than at the waterblocks. I think the cooler might have actually completely drained out, i dont feel any liquid sloshing. The processors look salvageable and are currently soaking in vinegar to get the corrosion off. The motherboard does not seem to have any corrosion at all. Both the case and the power supply were totally and completely destroyed. I have 2 spare 1.8ghz processors with heatsinks so i will swap those heatsinks onto the 2.7 ghz processor cards. I will pull the power supply out of the plywood G5 and test the 2.7 logic board and processors and if it works i will put them into the plywood g5 case. I will also test if the 2.7 processors will work on the 1.8 logic board.

 

[whiskersld]

hahaha its absolutely ridiculous, love it.

 

[mustagcoupe]

hahaha its absolutely ridiculous, love it.

Thank you, It is indeed ridiculous.

The dual 2.7ghz i bought works to some degree. I soaked both processor cards in vinegar, then water, then alcohol to clean the corrosion off. Processor 0 seems to be working normally. Processor 1 is reporting erratic and often negative temp numbers and the computer freezes after about 3 minutes and has to be force powered off. I put processor 1 back in the vinegar and will repeat the process hoping to get it working again. I am unsure if the logic board is totally working either, some of the fan speeds dont make sense.

I tried putting the 2.7ghz processors in the 1.8ghz board and the 1.8ghz in the 2.7 board. Both times resulted in power on but black screen and no bong. Putting one 1.8 and one 2.7 in each board resulted in the same black screen no bong. A single processor in the 2.7 logic board will not even power on where a single processor in the 1.8 board will boot normally. These are not the results i expected, it seems like an insane amount of effort put into preventing any kind of processor swapping that just doesnt seem to exist in any other apple product. I cant think of a single other mac that went so far to prevent processor swapping. I would have expected the 2.7 board to boot with the 1.8ghz processors. And programming the 2.7 not to power on with only a single processor seems weird but i guess makes sense because both processors were attached to a single cooling unit and cant be removed separately, so if only one shows up somethings not right. But why bother wasting the programming resources to do that.

If i can get both 2.7 processors and the board to work properly and not crash i will put them in the plywood G5. If i cant i will box up the parts and look for another doner. Even if the processors and logic board all turn out to be bad at least i got a working radeon 9650 and 2gb of ram for my 25 bucks so im happy no matter what.

 

[ahurst]

Im interested in seeing how that would perform to. I have a computer that i use exclusively for overclocking and testing lga 775 cpus. I can toss an e8600 in it send it to 4ghz and install tiger for some testing. Is there an easily available tiger hackintosh image i can use. I looked into this before and i had trouble finding a tiger hackintosh install that worked with most people saying just go to leopard since the hackintosh scene had advanced by then.

In the past few years, the OpenCore team has made the effort to back port a lot of their modern kext and bootloader work to be compatible with Tiger-Snow Leopard! I haven't tried it myself, but it should definitely be much easier to get a vanilla Tiger hackintosh experience than it was 3-4 years ago (provided you've got some experience in the area).

 

[mustagcoupe]

In the past few years, the OpenCore team has made the effort to back port a lot of their modern kext and bootloader work to be compatible with Tiger-Snow Leopard! I haven't tried it myself, but it should definitely be much easier to get a vanilla Tiger hackintosh experience than it was 3-4 years ago (provided you've got some experience in the area).

Interesting. I will have to look into that and see if i can get it working.

The dual 2.7 G5 is not fully functional. One of the processors is good as far as i can tell, one gives insane negative temp numbers and may not be good. I was able to boot it long enough to run cinebench R10 and R11.5. I think the u3 chip on the motherboard has bad solder joints. When i got it the plastic clips holding the heatsink had broken, sometimes it doesnt detect the memory in the first pair of slots and it will only boot from stone cold. It ran insanely hot and was quite loud, i think the 2.7 was just a step to far. It is fast though, it scored 3533 points in cinebench R10 and 0.96 points in R11.5 vs the dual 1.8 at 2471 in R10 and 0.60 points in R11.5. Im keeping the dual 1.8 setup in the Plywood G5, Its way quieter and more reliable. If i can find a dual 2.0 or 2.3 with a busted case i might consider upgrading it but for now it stays the way it is. I put the 2gb of ram that came in the 2.7 in the plywood G5 so now it has its max of 4gb. Im debating if i should put the radeon 9650 in my MDD G4 in place of the 64mb 9600 thats in it or in my single 1.8ghz g5.