Upgrade a PowerPC G5 motherboard?

[jchildress]

A friend of mine gave me a PowerPC G5 that he never uses. I would like to give my Intel MacBook to my wife to replace her WinXP laptop, but if I do, then I wont be able to write iPhone apps on the G5 (it needs to be intel based). So I was wondering in it's possible to buy an Intel motherboard and chip that is compatible with the G5's case? Before I pry it open I want to know if all of the networking, video and other components will still work when I put in a new mobo\chip\ram.

Also, is there anyway that I can look in the System Profiler or Disk Utility to see if this machine has a RAID card? When I go to the Raid tab in Disk Utility, it lists a RAID name, format and type. I'm assuming that means there is some kind of RAID on the G5. Or are those default values that are always there?

 

[BobZune]

1. Not possible in any cost effective manner. See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8242073

2. My Dual G5 (2.0GHz, PowerMac7,3) machine has nothing under the Hardware RAID under system profiler (says "This system does not contain any supported hardware RAID devices. If you have any hardware RAID devices connected, please ensure they are installed properly.")

Looks like you have a decent extra machine you'd have to put to good use!

 

[chipchen]

You can software raid, but it probably has no raid card. And no, you can't upgrade from a G5 to Intel.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

IF, and this is a B I G IF, you could find a mobo (like the ones apple uses) that would line up all the ports and connections to the backplane of the G5 case, then it would work. You may also have to change or mod the power supply & mounting holes a bit. You'd need a new video card, and possibly ram too. HD's & optical drives & peripherals should not be a major issue other than drivers/firmware. None of this would be cheap however.....

Of course the biggest pitfall to all of this, assuming everything else works out, is that you'd be stuck running windblows, unless of course you're prepared to violate the OS X EULA and the other steps necessary to build a true HACKINTOSH......but we wont get into that here, now will we

 

[jchildress]

I opened up the case, and was surprised at how well the machine is designed and assembled. I've never seen the inside of a Mac before, very impressive. And the mobo is defiantly not a standard size of any sort, so it looks like I'll only be upgrading the memory and HDDs. I have a couple more questions though.

1) Is there anyway to look at System Profiler to determine the maximum ram chip size I can use? I'm assuming that the machine can accept 8 1 GB chips. There are 8 DIMM slots in there. But before I buy any memory, I wanted to be sure.

2) I want to turn this machine into a media server, so I want to add two large HDDs replacing the 140 GB in there. Is there any software that will allow me to insert a second HDD as the slave and then copy the primary disc image onto the slave? then I'll pull out the small drive replacing it with the newly mirrored larger drive? I'm hoping to keep everything as is, just add a larger drive. Once that is done, I'll eventually add the second larger drive as a slave. "primary"? "slave"? I may still be talking in ATA terms. Does SATA still use the primary\slave concept?

Thanks again,

 

[BobZune]

1. You can look up the right documentation, or run the scanner from http://crucial.com/systemscanner/MacOS.aspx (other memory sellers may have something equivalent too) to find out more about the memory expansion.

2. Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper should allow you to clone a drive. SATA drives don't have a master/slave relationship -- each connects to a SATA host adapter/MB_port.

 

[jchildress]

Thanks Bob.

The Apple docs say that it can accept up to 1 GB DIMM modules. Which is good because I can upgrade to 8 GBs of RAM.

I found the SuperDuper software which I'll try out as soon as I get the new hard drive in.