No, this is not clickbait look. 😳 Anyone wanna try it?
Update:Made title look less sketchy,
Update:Made title look less sketchy,
Attachments
Last edited:
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Thunderbolt on a G5?
- Thread starter Apple Fan 2008
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I don't believe this. It's highly likely to be a typo or just incorrect.
Thunderbolt needs to be initialised by drivers for Thunderbolt devices to work in macOS. The listing itself says Thunderbolt functionality only works in macOS Sierra and up; only USB-C functionality is available on El Capitan. On Tiger or Leopard, neither Thunderbolt nor USB-C functionality will work due to missing drivers. Maybe it works in Linux on G5s.
Thunderbolt needs to be initialised by drivers for Thunderbolt devices to work in macOS. The listing itself says Thunderbolt functionality only works in macOS Sierra and up; only USB-C functionality is available on El Capitan. On Tiger or Leopard, neither Thunderbolt nor USB-C functionality will work due to missing drivers. Maybe it works in Linux on G5s.
🤷♂️ I haven’t tested it. I don’t have a G5. (Though I hope too)
You buy and send it to me, sure thing, I'll give it a shot 
Heck, I'll put it up on YT for ya 
Heck, I'll put it up on YT for ya They didn't define the word "work". Maybe it will do at least DisplayPort to Thunderbolt conversion (but what GPU for Power Mac G5 supports DisplayPort?).
I suppose if the Titan Ridge appears as a PCIe bridge in Open Firmware, then any connected devices might work even without OS drivers as long as you don't do any hot plugging.
Some Open Firmware code might be needed to activate the PCIe bridge functionality. Maybe this can be executed before PCI devices are enumerated (include
probe-all install-console banner in the nvramrc script).Some registers of the Open Firmware code may exist in PCIe config space (where the extended capabilities belong - beyond the first 256 bytes of config space). Is it possible to access extended capabilities in Open Firmware? Or maybe the card has a method for working without accessing extended capabilities directly.
If I had a PCIe G5 (well one that worked) I’d oblige haha. Only for the fact I want one for my Mac Pro.
Then Thunderbolt (and USB-C?) displays could possibly be used with the G5. No GPU that has DisplayPort is supported by Mac OS X on PowerPC AFAIK but a dual-link DVI to DisplayPort converter could be used.
Since you have a PCIe G5 and a Titan Ridge… would you be interested in giving this a try?
Last edited:
Not for that price. I could buy at least 3 more G5's for that amount.
How much is a G5Not for that price. I could buy at least 3 more G5's for that amount.
Free - $60 on average. I got 1 for $30, 1 for $50 and 1 for free. Don't bother looking at ebay prices. They are way out of line. Goodwill, market place and craigslist have the best prices.
I have a PCIe G5 but sadly no Titan Ridge...
I paid £20 GBP for mine ($23 USD). Someone I know found one dumped by the roadside, complete with the monitor and keyboard.
These days, eBay appears to be a haven for way out of line prices for almost anything that's perceived as retro. Especially if it carries an Apple logo. You can still get lucky here and there but I've started looking elsewhere.
Yeah, I've seen that in general with the UK equivalents.
Since I've acquired some Thunderbolt equipment recently this topic has now become interesting to me.
If I were able to find a Titan Ridge for cheap I'd probably try it on my G5 but I wonder how does one even connect the card to a Mac? Afaik just putting it into the PCIe slot doesn't suffice since you have to deal with the headers on the card as well in order to get it to work.
The only way one can get retro Apple stuff for a good price on eBay is when the item in question is being auctioned with a starting price of 1 €/$. At least that has been my experience so far. eBay has been great for me recently to get GPUs that are somewhat retro (2012 era) for a better price than what I would have paid locally and on other non-auction market sites.
If I were able to find a Titan Ridge for cheap I'd probably try it on my G5 but I wonder how does one even connect the card to a Mac? Afaik just putting it into the PCIe slot doesn't suffice since you have to deal with the headers on the card as well in order to get it to work.
The only way one can get retro Apple stuff for a good price on eBay is when the item in question is being auctioned with a starting price of 1 €/$. At least that has been my experience so far. eBay has been great for me recently to get GPUs that are somewhat retro (2012 era) for a better price than what I would have paid locally and on other non-auction market sites.
The headers don’t need to be connected to the mainboard — just two pins in one of them have to be bridged.
Last edited:
The issue with Thunderbolt on Power Mac is what devices are you going to connect to it? There's no NVMe driver or XHCI driver for USB 3.x. I suppose AHCI devices might work. There was a NVMe driver created for Intel Mac but the source was not released so you would have to recreate it (I think there's source on nvmexpress.org that could be useful). There's the GenericUSBXHCI.kext projects but I don't know how much work it would take to make it work for Leopard on PowerPC. I don't think there were any DisplayPort capable GPUs made for Power Mac? Maybe USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode can work using a DVI to DisplayPort adapter.
Are there no opensource projects with needed functionality (possibly without existing PPC support)? If code is there, chances are it can be potentially fixed.
Good to be in US for this (or Japan as well).
In smaller countries there are physically too few G5 Macs, and shipping one from anywhere makes the whole endeavor super-expensive. I paid about 150–170 USD for my Quad and 2.3DC each, and that still was cheaper than buying one for 50 bucks abroad and shipping.
PCIe AHCI SSDs work on G5s running Leopard (not as a boot drive though) so that would be a possibility.
Last edited:
I live in Austria and I haven't had any trouble finding G5s here and we're a pretty small country
Vintage Apple stuff isn't too rare here as well and when I think about this it's quite remarkable that this is the case.Not so much in Taiwan, at least late-2005 models
I have seen a Quad once (bought it) and 2.3 GHz twice (bought one of those). That was in a course of several years. In Japan at the same time they are plenty, but shipping a PowerMac…
I suppose that would be the case. The UK and Japan have always been major overseas Apple markets so finding even vintage Macs there is to be expected. Less so central Europe until relatively recently, with the exception of Germany. I was in Hong Kong around the turn of the millennium and remember seeing my very first large ACD in the flesh there, so I suspect Hong Kong with its British connections got more exposure to Apple than would otherwise have been the case.Not so much in Taiwan, at least late-2005 models
I have seen a Quad once (bought it) and 2.3 GHz twice (bought one of those). That was in a course of several years. In Japan at the same time they are plenty, but shipping a PowerMac…
A propos of nothing, this has reminded me that Apple released its PPC/68k notebooks in Germany with contrasting keyboards for no good reason. They looked awful and it only seems to be the German speaking market that was plagued with those.
