Sorbet Leopard on G5 Quad?

[mac57mac57]

Hi All,

I am attempting to bring up a G5 Quad. I am having issues with the fans, which accelerate to full speed and stay there once the machine is powered on, all under Tiger. iStat Menus shows that the CPU temperatures are just fine (running in the low 40's C) so the fans ARE doing their job, but they are too fast and too loud to make the machine comfortable to work with.

My ultimate goal for this machine is Sorbet Leopard. Does anyone out there have Sorbet running on a G5 Quad? Are the fans controlled properly and stay at low RPMs except when needed? Do CPU temperatures stay in bounds?

BTW, I know that these machines are prone to all sorts of cooling issues due to the complexity of the LCS, but before I get crazy about that, I want to check whether maybe I just have an incompatible software load on the machine, and whether Sorbet is in fact fully compatible with a G5 Quad... it should be!

BTW again, I am, as I type this, running Apple Service Diagnostics 2.6.3, which includes thermal calibration, so I will get all of that taken care of before proceeding to Sorbet Leopard.

Thanks!

 

[ChrisCharman]

10.5.8 is fully compatible with the Quad so sorbet is as well, as it is only 10.5.8 with customisation. You can install 3rd party fan control apps to adjust the thermal curve if you wish.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @ChrisCharman, that makes sense of course. Do you happen to know the names of any of those third party fan control apps?

After thermal calibration, the average resting fan speed dropped by 1000 RPM, to around 2200 RPM, but that is still fairly loud audibly. At the same time, CPU temps are running in the 40s C; I would be happy to run the CPUs a few degrees hotter if it would cut the fan speed down into the audibly comfortable range.

Perhaps once of those third party fan control apps might let me do that?

 

[ChrisCharman]

Thanks @ChrisCharman, that makes sense of course. Do you happen to know the names of any of those third party fan control apps?

After thermal calibration, the average resting fan speed dropped by 1000 RPM, to around 2200 RPM, but that is still fairly loud audibly. At the same time, CPU temps are running in the 40s C; I would be happy to run the CPUs a few degrees hotter if it would cut the fan speed down into the audibly comfortable range.

Perhaps once of those third party fan control apps might let me do that?

Possibly QuickFans could do the trick. Worth searching around on the various sites that host legacy software for PowerPC Macs for alternative options if not.

 

[jktwice]

Running Sorbet right now on my Quad. Very solid, very stable, quite fast for such an old machine. It will also install software meant for 10.5.8 just fine (I have a copy of Avid MC 3.1.1 installed and it installed like expected). It is just 10.5.8 with customizations as stated above.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @jktwice, I am running Sorbet presently on my 2.3 GHz G5 DP, and I agree... it is nicely fast on such old hardware. I use that machine in one way or another almost every day... AND it hosts my Internet-visible Gopher server (gopher://happymacs.ddns.net), which serves up a large collection of vintage Mac software. So, it is a busy and productive machine. I have always loved the G5s.

 

[barracuda156]

I am attempting to bring up a G5 Quad. I am having issues with the fans, which accelerate to full speed and stay there once the machine is powered on, all under Tiger. iStat Menus shows that the CPU temperatures are just fine (running in the low 40's C) so the fans ARE doing their job, but they are too fast and too loud to make the machine comfortable to work with.

My ultimate goal for this machine is Sorbet Leopard. Does anyone out there have Sorbet running on a G5 Quad?

Unless something got specifically broken due to customizations, it should work fine, since 10.5.8 was obviously the reference system for Apple at the time.

There was a brief period when I had “sorbet-customized” 10.5.8 installed on a partition, and I don’t remember facing any particular issues with the hardware due to that. I did not use it much and deleted it after, but while I used it, that was CPU-intensive, and I guess no abnormalities with fans took place.

 

[jktwice]

Thanks @jktwice, I am running Sorbet presently on my 2.3 GHz G5 DP, and I agree... it is nicely fast on such old hardware. I use that machine in one way or another almost every day... AND it hosts my Internet-visible Gopher server (gopher://happymacs.ddns.net), which serves up a large collection of vintage Mac software. So, it is a busy and productive machine. I have always loved the G5s.

I will give one caveat though: If you are interested in doing actual work, there is an issue with Sorbet and I/O that seems to crop up every now and then, and is making me consider switching to Leopard 10.5.8 (but what will most likely actually happen is I will switch to Snow Leopard PPC full time).

A strange issue I just noticed is that Sorbet *specifically* doesn't like my USB Audio Interface. Now you could say "well, no duh! No drivers for your Scarlett Solo Gen 4. Of course it doesn't work." A good posit, but this bad boy can operate without drivers because it was made reasonably. It's about as plug and play as the old Apogee Duet which famously included drivers in Mac OS after a certain point.

I tried in Tiger. It is a mess but it works. You need to plug it into the front I/O of the G5 to get it to work. Plugging it into the rear ports seems more sensible, but applications such as LEGO Star Wars seem to not like that and will play music through the interface but sound effects through the internal speakers... curious indeed.

Snow Leopard PPC meanwhile detects it fine within the new Audio MIDI Setup application. Same situation but I didn't get much of a chance to test because SL doesn't like me launching Logic 9, so I will install it on Snow Leopard directly and give it a whirl (or Reason 4 if I am particularly lazy/Logic 9 doesn't want to play ball).

The web performance makes Sorbet a worthy choice, but the moment Snow Leopard PPC overtakes it I think Sorbet will be left in the dust. Shuriken meanwhile is on my Tiger install and exhibits none of these issues described above.

EDIT: It seems you are well aware of these issues. There's definitely something screwy with Sorbet, which makes me want to keep supporting SLPPC even more. Some universal kexts likely got stripped from Leopard 10.5.8, and results in these issues. Really damn strange your FireWire iSight exhibited issues though... that is a FW device that had been around well before Leopard, so it should have been supported by even exclusive PPC drivers.

 

[mac57mac57]

@jktwice, I understand, but I look at the iSight issue as a fair price for the performance I get. I worked around that with a different, USB, webcam. My guess is that Snow Leopard PPC has its fair share of such issues too. I installed it first, and it was so buggy I backed it out and went to Sorbet. I have been a "happy camper" ever since. Sorbet is stable, fast and runs just about everything I need. I am guessing that it has fewer issues than Snow Leopard PPC.

 

[jktwice]

@jktwice, I understand, but I look at the iSight issue as a fair price for the performance I get. I worked around that with a different, USB, webcam. My guess is that Snow Leopard PPC has its fair share of such issues too. I installed it first, and it was so buggy I backed it out and went to Sorbet. I have been a "happy camper" ever since. Sorbet is stable, fast and runs just about everything I need. I am guessing that it has fewer issues than Snow Leopard PPC.

oh absolutely. Snow Leopard PPC has a lot of problems but I think since it is being actively developed atm and is based on a real 64-bit kernel, it has a lot of potential. I could see in the next year more and more people deciding to install that over Sorbet.

It might even play nice with your iSight camera. Give it a whirl sometime. Installation is similar to Sorbet.

 

[mac57mac57]

Interesting... I will check to see if there is new version since the last one I tried; if there is, I will give it a whirl on the G5 Quad I am working on, assuming I ever getting the cooling into check.

Right now, even though the CPU temps are perfect, the fans are running so fast, and so LOUD to accomplish this that the machine is essentially unusable.

It goes on the bench today, and the disassembly begins. I will extract the CPUs, repaste them and put the assembly back in to see if repasting has helped. If not, and I suspect "not", I will proceed to the much more arduous and complex task of draining and recharging the LCS.

Cameron Kaiser will be my guide for much of this - he has written an excellent and very detailed set of instructions for how to do this correctly.

 

[ChrisCharman]

All current development for 10.6.8 PowerPC is located in this thread

 

[ToniCH]

Interesting... I will check to see if there is new version since the last one I tried; if there is, I will give it a whirl on the G5 Quad I am working on, assuming I ever getting the cooling into check.

Right now, even though the CPU temps are perfect, the fans are running so fast, and so LOUD to accomplish this that the machine is essentially unusable.

It goes on the bench today, and the disassembly begins. I will extract the CPUs, repaste them and put the assembly back in to see if repasting has helped. If not, and I suspect "not", I will proceed to the much more arduous and complex task of draining and recharging the LCS.

Cameron Kaiser will be my guide for much of this - he has written an excellent and very detailed set of instructions for how to do this correctly.

The Sorbet is optimized for performance. So, the CPUs are running at 100% all the time, thus the fans are blowing hard. You can see this by observing CPU voltages in the iStat Menus or other such software. They are unusually high even when you are not doing anything.

The following is out of my memory, I am quite sure the setting is in there but if not maybe somebody else remembers the correct terms for it and the location:

Go to System preferences, open the energy settings and try to find the proper setting in there (cannot remember what it is but I think it was quite self explaining like CPU Performance or something?). Set it to "automatic". With this settings the CPUs can idle and run slower when full blast is not needed.

Hope this helps.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @ToniCH. Good tip and I appreciate you taking the time to pass it on.

Happily, I have already "been there and done that"... It is in the Energy Savings preference pane, in the tab named "Options" (I am also working from memory right now, so the names may be slightly different). I tried both "Automatic" and " Reduced". Automatic made little to no impact; Reduced dropped the fan revs by a few hundred, but this was still more noisy than I liked.

In the end however, I didn't get the fastest G5 ever made just to run it at "Reduced" CPU mode! I *want* to run it at "Highest". I had a Quad as my "daily driver" for a year or so around 2012, and I ran it at "Highest" the entire time; it was beautifully quiet that entire year. When the cooling system works... it works!

That is what I am targeting as I rebuild the Quad I have now. I am tracking that rebuild in a separate thread here at MacRumors:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-quad-chronicles-restoring-a-hot-g5-quad.2448690/

Thanks again!

 

[Edgecrusherr]

I have the single Dual-Core 2GHz 970MP / final variant from 2005 (PCIe version), and have never been able to get Sorbet working. I believe it boots to a blue screen, and had posted about it on the main Sorbet 1.5 threat, but no one was able to figure it out. I have the Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT, but it's one of the CTO cards that came with this model, so I don't think that's the issue. I tried both a fresh restore of a working image, as well as pulled the working drive out of my PoweRMaC G4, nothing worked.

Has anyone had a similar issue, or had a luck on this model?

 

[ToniCH]

Has anyone had a similar issue, or had a luck on this model?

I have the same model (PM G5 2GHz DC late 2005). I think it worked ok when I bought it in 2022. Then later on it started to crash to grey error screen every time after few minutes of use. I tried lots of things (RAM, drives, GPUs etc.) but never figured out what caused the crash and the logs always pointed to some random different thing, so I assumed it was a logic board or cpu problem and finally gave up.

Now that you mention that you have problem with Sorbet 😲....I installed Sorbet on mine too but originally I had something else in it. Maybe I should revisit it and install something stock and see if I have any better luck. 🧐

Does yours work with standard 10.4x or 10.5.8?

 

[barracuda156]

It should be a common sense to always use an unscrewed, official 10.5.8 as a point of reference.

If that does not work – it is not the OS issue.
If that works but a hacked distro fails – it’s a bug in that hacked distro.

 

[ToniCH]

It should be a common sense to always use an unscrewed, official 10.5.8 as a point of reference.

Sure, and I even might have tried it but cannot remember anymore. At the time I was upgrading my 2 G5's with heavy hand. Various SSD's, mSATA's, OWC Accelsior S, x1900, FX4500, wifi upgrades, USB-cards, RAM etc etc. + software. At some point crashing started and I started going back to bare bone setup step by step. Tried all that I could imagine at the time.

To be honest I do not remember all and I might have tried stock OS's too. But, I never suspected that Sorbet could cause it because it has worked in everything I have tried it with from various G4's to several G5's including the Quad. If there is one model in all of that it is not compatible with, that I could not suspect. 🤯

But now as the possibility has been suggested I must give it a try. My plan was to replace the 2.0DC logic board and cpu with Quad internals as I have a complete set of from a unit which had a bad case. But, if the 2.0DC works after all this then I won't be doing that. I will just keep the Quad parts as spares for my other one.

EDIT: booted it up. It has 10.5.8. So, it seems I have tried that too already. I left it now to run benchmarks, if it has not self healed I expect it will crash at some point. But, in my case I believe the Sorbet was not the culprit for the crashes.

EDIT2: Yes, 1 hour with no crashes. Next boot, crash after 20 seconds. Next boot, crash after 10 minutes.

 

[Edgecrusherr]

I have the same model (PM G5 2GHz DC late 2005). I think it worked ok when I bought it in 2022. Then later on it started to crash to grey error screen every time after few minutes of use. I tried lots of things (RAM, drives, GPUs etc.) but never figured out what caused the crash and the logs always pointed to some random different thing, so I assumed it was a logic board or cpu problem and finally gave up.

Now that you mention that you have problem with Sorbet 😲....I installed Sorbet on mine too but originally I had something else in it. Maybe I should revisit it and install something stock and see if I have any better luck. 🧐

Does yours work with standard 10.4x or 10.5.8?

Interesting! Yes, works great in 10.5.8 and 10.4. I have them both installed. I even have the shuriken mod to 10.4.

 

[barracuda156]

There's definitely something screwy with Sorbet, which makes me want to keep supporting SLPPC even more.

There have been a number of reports that something is broken in 10.5.8 “Sorbet” mod, which works perfectly fine in a standard 10.5.8. The general problem seems to be that a) nothing was tested for anything beyond a few popular apps, especially building anything; b) at least some “optimizations” had in mind to tweak how system looks at the expense of how it performs (breaking system versions query APIs is insane, for example).
It would be fine if it was clearly communicated to an end-user that this is an experimental build with this-and-that goals in mind. Unfortunately, it is marketed as an upgrade of 10.5.8 – sorry, it is not.

 

[mac57mac57]

All that having been said @barracuda156, I have been running Sorbet on two Quads, a Dual and a G4 Sawtooth for months. It is remarkably stable, smooth and fast. The only issue I have ever experienced was with Apple's FW400 iSight camera, and for now, even that has gone away - my iSight works great now on my AirQuad.

I did see some issues with FW800 support, but narrowed that down to some form of FW800 chip set (I am guessing) incompatibility. I have since used several older FW800 devices that work well with Sorbet.

So, agreed, it is "hacked distro", but the "hacker" did a darn great job!

 

[barracuda156]

So, agreed, it is "hacked distro", but the "hacker" did a darn great job!

Until you try building something

 

[jktwice]

There have been a number of reports that something is broken in 10.5.8 “Sorbet” mod, which works perfectly fine in a standard 10.5.8. The general problem seems to be that a) nothing was tested for anything beyond a few popular apps, especially building anything; b) at least some “optimizations” had in mind to tweak how system looks at the expense of how it performs (breaking system versions query APIs is insane, for example).
It would be fine if it was clearly communicated to an end-user that this is an experimental build with this-and-that goals in mind. Unfortunately, it is marketed as an upgrade of 10.5.8 – sorry, it is not.

The issue I was referring to in that post had to do with USB audio interfaces. Traditionally these do not require drivers but for Leopard the driver stack was updated and it seems to have lost some compatibility. Whereas in Tiger/Shuriken the audio interface can't really do input but output works just fine, in Leopard I can't get sound to play at all. This goes for normal 10.5.8 as well.

I have encountered other issues though. ATI Displays doesn't install correctly which limits the resolution options I can pick. Could be a problem with Leopard itself too. No problems in Tiger. I get some strange error when it comes to displaying certain contextual menus too when I have stuff installed. It's not entirely stable and for a G5 user I would go as far to say that you do not need Sorbet. Nothing in Sorbet offers enough of a significant performance advantage for users to really want to use it over 10.5.8 ESPECIALLY for building. You use this when you don't want to do all of the fixes yourself for your G4 systems where people seem to think Leopard is slow but really its just that GPUs can't quite handle the dock effects at a smooth framerate and everything else save for Spotlight is fine.

People want Snow Leopard for their system. Sorbet was born out of wanting to get some of SL beta's advancements in. Now we have a real working Snow Leopard build. We should promote the awareness of this and encourage users to send in feedback and get them used to using MacPorts too.

 

[Doq]

People want Snow Leopard for their system. Sorbet was born out of wanting to get some of SL beta's advancements in. Now we have a real working Snow Leopard build. We should promote the awareness of this and encourage users to send in feedback and get them used to using MacPorts too.

Let me know when sleep is working and I'll join the bandwagon.

 

[mac57mac57]

I don't want to start a "religious war" here, but I honestly don't see the point of SL_PPC. In my experience, it won't run SL apps, which are all Intel, and it still has a long way to go when basics like unmounting a disk don't work properly.

Since I have to run Leopard apps, doesn't it make sense to run (Sorbet) Leopard?

Perhaps the "under the hood" stuff in SL_PPC is faster, but Sorbet is plenty fast, and in my experience at least, is rock solid. It is after all the final release of Leopard, updated with tweaks. Of course it will be more stable than SL_PPC, which is based on an early beta of SL! I would LOVE to have a "release quality" Snow Leopard for PPC, but at least for now, SL_PPC is not it.

Don't get me wrong; I love the idea and I encourage the project, but for now I will stay with Sorbet. If and when the SL_PPC project delivers an "out of box" install/run experience comparable to that of any other released OS, I will go for it. Until then, I will remain on the sidelines, cheering you on.