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"Vintage" G5 gets no support at Apple Store anymore
- Thread starter Darth Maynard
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And cow manure is not ape sh:t. What is that supposed to tell us? Perhaps you care to explain why an open firmware ROM file for a HD3870 is supposed to be a technical impossibility.
I believe I just told you... ATI likely decided that the market was not big enough to warrant doing so.
(And you originally said that Apple should update the G5's firmware to be able to talk to EFI cards, which is a technical impossibility.)
I never wrote such a thing. Please check my post #43. I said that Apple should update their firmware (implicit on logic boards and graphic boards) to support all graphic cards that are PCIe compatible and have Leopard drivers. That isn't quite revolutionary and should not be a technical problem. The customer should not be disadvantaged if Apple decides to use three different firmware systems in four years. It is up to them to properly support the chaos they introduce.
It makes sense to read properly before jumping to conclusions.
You can get four or five year APP if you're a school or university. Everything we buy here at my job has four-year APP.
On the contrary, Apple's after sales service is the best I have ever seen in the industry, at least in my experience.
The problem with this scenario is that the machine still cuts it in the modern world despite being old. This particular machine was the fastest personal computer in the world at the time of its introduction, so despite being fast even by todays standards, it is classed as a vintage system since it is 6 years old. A PC from the same time period, for the same price, would be pretty much obsolete by now.
And to be honest OP, did you really expect support 6 years after purchase?
I can still get replacement parts from HP for my Compaq SP700 workstation dated 1999. I'd pay for it but I can still have it repaired. It was a dual PII Xeon with 4GB max ram capacity and some 10K SCSI drives. I've upgraded it to dual PIII 550Mhz Xeons and larger drives and a Radeon 9800 Pro AGP. While its still old, its still fully usable as long as the application is not extremely CPU dependant. Apps that require disk I/O still do well on that box.
You've just suggested they replace the machine firmware AGAIN, and no, they can't do that.
The cards don't have enough room on the chips for a Open Firmware ROM, so this again is impossible.
You can't update either the card or the machine (or as you call it, the logic board.)
So again, you'd have to ask ATI why they didn't ship a card with a ROM large enough to support an Open Firmware ROM.
Also, for technical reasons Intel and PowerPC use different firmwares. This is the way things go, and it's out of Apple's hands. Tough luck. Things move on.
You obviously have no clue. Firmware on mother boards (Apple call them logic boards not me) and on graphic boards is frequently replaced by other vendors. It is entirely common in the industry to get firmware upgrades after years when new features are needed by customers. My last PC was a Shuttle that was designed in 2003. I think it was 250 $ as a barebone. The last BIOS update was released in 2007 and introduced USB 2.0 booting to this fairly old machine because booting from floppies went out of style. So the good folks at Shuttle figured their customers would need that feature and provided it free of charge. Apple issued two or three firmware updates to the entire G5 Power Mac range and those were mainly bug fixes for things that went wrong in the first place.
The EEPROM on the HD3870 has a size of 64kB or 512 kbit. It is exactly the same that was used on the Geforce 6600 that was used as a standard in the 2005 Power Mac. How on earth do you figure that Apple could fail to put the necessary open firmware file on that chip? If you don't believe me I will rip the card out, identify the chip and post the specification here. But it is unnessesary. I have flashed many cards for PCs, Mac Pros and Power Macs and know hwat I'm talking about. Apple have sometimes used even bigger 128kB EEPROMs that are only now appearing in PC cards. Believe me there is no problem to the willing. The problem is they aren't willing.
Btw, you don't need to point out that EFI and Open Firmware are different. That knowledge has been around for some time. Read post #43!
And finally none of your points contradicts my expectation that Apple should properly support their 3-6 year old top end luxury towers. It is an entirely reasonable expectation by a buyer who invests 2000-5000$ in a modular machine that offers user replacable PCI/PCIe cards and drives. Motherboard manufacturers do this for 50$ products, so why can't Apple do it? Do they think their customers are so brainwashed that they do not realize the rip off?
I have a G5 dual 1.8 power PC...Bought some ram put it in & booted up. Then a red light came on the logic board behind the power button. The machine wouldn't turn on....I called apple care & we rearranged the ram, now the red light is gone but my system still won't boot up. The white power light blinks every few seconds...
the apple store told me sorry can't help because your machine is vintage... ANY help would be greatly appreciated.
Even if my logic board is fried is there a place to buy one on the cheap?
Darthboarder
the apple store told me sorry can't help because your machine is vintage... ANY help would be greatly appreciated.
Even if my logic board is fried is there a place to buy one on the cheap?
Darthboarder
There is hope that the logic board isn't fried. I would throw out the RAMs and make sure that you use only those RAM sticks that were previously working in the machine. Then you need to arrange the RAM sticks in a symmetrical fashion. If you have two RAM banks (which I believe you have) fit the sticks from the inside to the outside and use identical sticks to the inner pair of slots and the next set of slots going out from inside.
You should also use the diagnostic disk that came with your machine. It is usually the second DVD which also carries the apps like iLive and iWork samples.
Logic boards are only available from Apple and part vendors that canibalized old systems. They are hugely expensive. Best chance for a cheaper replacement would be someone selling his broken down Mac in parts on Ebay.
You should also use the diagnostic disk that came with your machine. It is usually the second DVD which also carries the apps like iLive and iWork samples.
Logic boards are only available from Apple and part vendors that canibalized old systems. They are hugely expensive. Best chance for a cheaper replacement would be someone selling his broken down Mac in parts on Ebay.
I had that machine and it was EXTREMELY picky about ram. Make sure your ram is "Apple certified for the Powermac G5"
Three blinking lights on the power button and three beeps mean it is bad ram, btw. Also reset the PRAM.
Sorry to sound so dumb, but doesn't my NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512mb graphics card on my Powermac Quad G5 do HD.264?
It's derived off of the 7800 GTX. You'll get partial acceleration via PureVideo HD 1.
I'm a Computer Science major working in graphics. I have quite a few clues.
Yes, it is.
Not usually, but sometimes.
Ok. Let's review again in since you don't seem to get it. Using a new graphics card requires an EFI BIOS. PowerPC does not work with EFI BIOS. So Apple can release an update that lets you use an EFI graphics card, as long as you are willing to chuck your processors in the trash. Got it? Good.
The current cards use 1 MB EEPROMs which are just enough to fit EFI32, EFI64 (which are both standards mandated by Intel so stop giving Apple crap about it), and BIOS. There isn't enough room for Open Firmware support. Period. You can't even fit both EFI and BIOS into a 512 kbit EEPROM. The idea that you can also fit an Open Firmware ROM in is ******* insane.
Yes, I know, I worked with the first Intel Macs and was around when Apple was debating moving to EFI.
You're asking for something that is technically impossible to do and cannot be done even if Apple wanted to.
Read the last quote. It's not possible. Can't be done. It's not marketing. It's technical.
Ya. The point you should have made was that Intel wrote EFI for Intel hardware and its only licensed for Intel hardware. OpenFirmware (or OpenBoot), was originally wrote by Sun for SPARC and later open sourced. It can be modified to work on any platform. So it could be possible to adopt OB to Intel machines, but not the other way around. Apple of course had 0 focus on jeopardizing resources or stability when they made the switch to the Intel platform and mainstream Itanium and Xeon platforms were already on the market running EFI making the switch from OB a no brainer.
Yeah, in theory it would be possible for Apple to license EFI and rewrite it to work on a PowerPC machine (if EFI could even fit in the EEPROM on a G5 motherboard), but then your Open Firmware hardware would stop working, which would put you on the other side of the incompatibility divide.
There isn't a way to get both working on the same box.
With all your learning you you can't even remember the difference between 1 Mbit and 1 MB. The bigger EEPROMs currently used have 128 kB and not 1 MB. That's for starters.
Next you are completely mistaken to think that a modern graphics card needs a BIOS or EFI file to work in an Open Firmware machine. That is crap. In actual fact such a configuration would be completely useless for a PPC machine because it would never run Windows. So why would anybody ever want to fit BIOS, EFI and OF on one card? That would not make any sense, unless you wanted to be able to swap cards between all machines all the time.
I would not ask such nonsense. For me a PPC card needs to run in a PPC machine and a Mac Pro card should run in all mac Pros under OS X and Windows. That is entirely feasible.
And for those folks who think that Apple deserve no criticism for their lack of after market support I just think you are hopeless. Keep wasting your money for new machines where simple upgrades would keep your machines happily running for years.
Really? Memory, HD, graphic card upgrades are simple. But unless you call switching a CPU + logic board simple, keep talking and show how little you know. Let's I buy an iMac right now, doesn't matter which model. It will run fine for 5 years, and then what? Its value by then is nearly cut in half. Spending even $100 is roughly 1/5 of the total machine's worth. I assume a CPU + logic board would cost more than $100. Why would I do that? Wait, it's just people who are really smart like you, whereas my math skills are completely wrong and I'm completely stupid.
There is no great secret to changing a CPU or even a MoBo in a modular machine. Everybody who has build a PC from a barebone has done that. I just went from MacPro1,1 Quad 2,66 GHz to Octad 3,0 GHz. It cost me 476$ net for two used x5365 Xeons and 90 minutes of work. In terms of performance my machine went from 2500$ to 4000$ sales value. Of course I dont kid myself that I made that kind of money but I got the performance as if I had spent it. Adding a modern graphics card can give simillar value enhancements if graphics are the bottleneck of your machine.