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Suggestions for PowerMac G5 DC 2.3GHz...

What would I need?

1. PC pcie power cable
2. PCie slot on a pc
3. boot disk, a usb thumb drive should work, am i right?
4. a pc QFX 4500
5. QFX 4500 rom
 
Just an update, got myself a cheap SSD identical to my previous SSD, replaced my HDD on the bottom slot and did a software Raid0. I don't have a gauge how fast it is since I have lost my former bench mark results, but it seems that it made the system slower.

I have also bought a 1TB External Drive with quad interface for TM and data disk. It is now connected to FW800. Would it be better if I use eSATA instead?
 
nice machine you have there and yea i can understand the want of a powerpc mac i have a 700 mhz g4 imac lampshade model that i am using for some of my older blizzard games that run to fast on my windows and newer macbookpro 13 mid 2010 and late 09 mac mini that are running lion still cant get diablo one to work and my win 7 machine is to much for the game as u run to fast in the game so i am pulling out an old dell 800 mhz p3 and installing win xp to play that one lol i have way to many computers
 
Xbench result with 2 x 60gb SSD on Software RAID0;

Results 136.17
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.8 (9L31a)
Physical RAM 8704 MB
Model PowerMac11,2
Processor PowerPC G5x2 @ 2.30 GHz
L1 Cache 64K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 1024K @ 2.30 GHz
Bus Frequency 1 GHz
Drive Type MacSSD RAid0
CPU Test 137.51
GCD Loop 105.01 5.54 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 152.89 3.63 Gflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 299.50 11.94 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 117.89 3.89 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 117.96 20.54 Mops/sec
Thread Test 100.36
Computation 116.16 2.35 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 88.33 3.80 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 147.58
System 154.16
Allocate 215.24 790.42 Kalloc/sec
Fill 216.67 10534.81 MB/sec
Copy 98.05 2025.17 MB/sec
Stream 141.53
Copy 140.37 2899.37 MB/sec [G5]
Scale 137.67 2844.20 MB/sec [G5]
Add 143.19 3050.31 MB/sec [G5]
Triad 145.11 3104.35 MB/sec [G5]
Quartz Graphics Test 155.73
Line 125.46 8.35 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 148.47 44.33 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 132.55 10.80 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 138.77 3.50 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 377.32 23.60 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 97.50
Spinning Squares 97.50 123.68 frames/sec
User Interface Test 139.08
Elements 139.08 638.30 refresh/sec
Disk Test 283.55
Sequential 183.52
Uncached Write 301.70 185.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 275.25 155.74 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.20 24.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 353.45 177.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 623.30
Uncached Write 352.05 37.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 482.08 154.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2307.30 16.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 935.34 173.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Click to expand...
 
Update...

Apple airport runway card came in today. Put my spare PBook Airport extreme card in it. Pulled out BT USB dongle.

Voila! BT and AX working natively. The powermac can now wake up from sleep with the magic mouse and wireless keyboard. Sweet!
 
untrue

alust2013 said:
I'd pass on a velociraptor, they're pretty noisy and hot.
Click to expand...

This is false information.
I recommend at least reading some reviews to get the facts straight before posting.

Hot may have been true of the Raptor drives, but not of the Velociraptor.
I have VR 300GB drives (or SSDs) as boot drives in almost all of my systems, including my Mac. The VR temperatures are within 1C of my WD Green drives.

Regarding noise, they are typically no louder than many of my other WD Blue and Black drives, except during high-random seek periods where they are marginally louder.

And regarding the performance difference, a VR 300 or VR 600 will outperform even a WD Black 1TB overall due to the higher IO and lower seek (thanks to 10k RPM).
I noticed a measurable performance increase for IO and seek, 4K and large files when I upgraded my systems to VR's. And even moreso when upgrading the slow 250GB drive in my Mac G5.
SSD is of course faster, but you can get VR 300GB drives for considerably less than 320GB SSDs.
 
Nameci said:
Update...

Apple airport runway card came in today. Put my spare PBook Airport extreme card in it. Pulled out BT USB dongle.

Voila! BT and AX working natively. The powermac can now wake up from sleep with the magic mouse and wireless keyboard. Sweet!
Click to expand...

Very nice mate, ---Jelous now--- :D
 
VanneDC said:
Very nice mate, ---Jelous now--- :D
Click to expand...

Hehehehe, to make you more jealous;

Next on the list, PCIe eSATA card to drive my 1TB external with quad interface for data storage and time machine, 4 sticks more of 2 GB RAM, and the penultimate upgrade, the ever elusive QFX 4500.

I would like to pair it in the near future with a decent dv camera.

Man, this machine still kicks ass with the early core 2 duo's. Geekbench numbers might be lower, but it feels faster. Is it just me or is it true? I find it even more responsive than an early MP 1,1.
 
OP, if I can suggest something, consider replacing these 2 cheap SSDs with one decent. Booting from SW RAID 0 with SSDs does not give much speed but decreases reliability :) Even choked with SATA 150 limit decent SSD should be better, and you'll get one SATA port for storage.
 
Nameci said:
Man, this machine still kicks ass with the early core 2 duo's. Geekbench numbers might be lower, but it feels faster. Is it just me or is it true? I find it even more responsive than an early MP 1,1.
Click to expand...


Yeah I've got my Dual Core 2.3 running with 7Gbs of RAM and it feels just as if not more snappy than my Core 2 Duo Mini w/ 3GBs of (slightly faster) RAM.

These G5's are still work horses and there's still very useable software for them. In fact, there's even current PowerPC software being released!


Serato Scratch LIVE - Still PPC, amazing, and one of the best turntablist/DJ low-latency Digital Vinyl Systems out there, and I use it for my $1,200 Technics DJ battle setup, thus, quite nice to have a PPC version for the expensive hardware :D

Cinema 4D - seems to be excellent rendering software, still PPC support (IIRC)

blender - still PPC support

Lightwave - still PPC support (IIRC)

Mixxx - Still PPC support

....just to name a few


And then there's using the older versions of Apple software that still isn't that far off from current versions, like iLife '09 vs 11 etc.

And then there's the fact too that Apple still supports PPC with software and OS X Leopard updates for the OS, Safari, iTunes, and all that.
 
I plan on getting exactly that model as a tie over between my Dual 800Mhz G4 and an intel Mac Mini.

I added a SATA 1.5 card and 750Gb Western Digital Caviar Black to my G4 partitioned 90Gb system, the rest for storage and put my iTunes library on the storage partition. It virtually halved booting and app launching times over the drive it replaced.

I use my G4 for Protools LE which even now takes an age to load it's huge score library, iTunes is a beast to open too so when I get a G5, I'm going to use the first partition of the Caviar Black as a recording drive and add an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD as the boot drive.

G5s still only have SATA 1.5 but because that particular model has PCIe slots like the original Mac Pro that replaced them, there's an ACER sata 3 card that's compatible with PCIe based Macs:-

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1053587/

It's not bootable and only the internal ports work but add that with a G5 Jive and a Vertex 3 SATA III SSD (or 2 in a RAID 0 config) and you'd have a hell of a scratch volume if you use photoshop! You could even use 2 SSDs with the onboard SATA in a RAID 0 to boot from and use the G5 Jive and a SATA card to add an ordinary hard drive for general storage and second one for back up.
 
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barkmonster, actually the drive I think would be epic for a G5 would be the VelociRaptors by Western Digital: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0..._m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0AFMKCXPHKK7Q3YZ2JR0


They incredibly well engineered - SERVER GRADE - 10,000RPM SATA II (now III) drives that hit just right around the peak of the SATA 150 interface in the G5's, offer more GB per dollar than SSDs, have a 5 year warranty, and in RAID 0 bootable would probably offer around a 300MB/s solid through put (seriously, these drives are faster than some older SSD's).


Or..then again...SSDs coming down in price would be an even better option IMO, but these VelociRaptors are pretty sweet drives.
 
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Just found these: http://www.computerforum.com/188978-spinpoint-f4-omg.html


Now, I've been using a Samsung SpinPoint drive in my Dell XPS 400 for about 6 months and it the QUIETEST, FASTEST, and just most SUPERB HDD I've ever used, and forgot all about the newer models.


This thing, while not even remotely close to SSD's for seek time (which is what matters the most), it still has near SATA-150 early-SSD performance/VelociRaptor performnace, be nearly silent, and, look at the price :cool:

Think I just found one of the best/fastest mechanical drives out there that has yet to be beat.
 
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I have opted for the SSD on S/W Raid0 for a couple of reasons; first I already have the first one and I have bought the other one cheap. Second, noise and temperature. SSD's operate cooler than spinning mechanical drives afaik.

I don't worry much about booting time, since the machine is most of the time always on and just sleeps. But loading times for apps takes more time on mechanical drives than on SSD's.

So far my setup has been stable enough. I have an external on FW800 for TM and data which later on will transfer to eSATA. The previous eSATA card that I got did screw up my ethernet. If eSATA card is installed, ethernet will not connect to the network. Seems there is a conflict on the PCIe bus. But read and write speeds via eSATA was a huge improvement from the FW800. External on USB is a shame, imho.
 
alust2013 said:
I'd pass on a velociraptor, they're pretty noisy and hot. A good 7200 RPM HDD should be fine, and a soft RAID will make it faster with another drive or 2.
Click to expand...

Soft RAID performance is actually pretty dismal... I'd stay away from it. Check out Barefeats if you want confirmation.
 
Mate, thats really starting to look like a nice little box mate. and yeah drooling more and more... SSD... I cant do it, luckily enough i have a SSD in my macpro, but dont think the missus would let me shoot for another SSD.. :)

any luck yet with finding a pcie mobo to do the rom swap on the fx4500?

cheers
 
still saving up for the qfx 4500, it will come soon... :D

it's pretty weird, there is this urge for me to get a Quad but instead I went for the dual core. I was a bit apprehensive about the LCS that comes with the quad maintenance wise. It is nice to have something to tinker on the weekends...
 
The quads are fine, as long as when u get it check the lcs, if it's on the way out, just fix it, lots of guides on the web for replacement o rings and tubing. I recon they have a much worse rap than they should have. It's mostly because peeps don't Check the lcs and continue to run it when it's leaking. General maintenance I call it.

That said, I do just turn my dc pm on without ever checking anything. Lack of maintenance requirements I call it.

There both fine boxes. The quad was a lot quieter though. :D
 
I have an issue that has just popped recently. Right after I have replaced the iogear BT dongle with an apple AE+BT combo, my mouse pointer movement seems to stutter and jerky.

I have searched the forums and it leads me to believe that it is caused by insufficient radio signal for the BT. Battery level indicates still more than half of the capacity for the MM.

There are two wires connected to the antenna, would it be that the antenna is causing it? Will swapping the two wires improve radio reception?

Guess will have to try... wish me luck.

Update: Swapped the wires, improved a little on the range and is useable on any location all across the desk. Guess those were two separate cables for the AE and the BT?
 
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