hi guys, im new here. ive been reading thru some of the mod posts for G5 and very impressive. I have an old dual 1.8ghz G5 (3gb ram, 1 TB HD) I make music and would really like to make it faster and handle more precessing, and also to run Snow Leopard. I emailed a few mac people and they all said i can not fit an Intel Xenon logic board, and bassically i cant really vamp my old machine up at all. Is this true? If not, what could i do to make this machine top spec? Thanks for any suggestions.
It is true, you can't put Xeons in your current machine. You could buy a complete new Intel system and mod your current case so that it can fit inside - but you can't install Snow Leopard on it, or at least not in a legal way. I think Hackintosh might be more trouble than it is worth, so you'd be looking at a windows machine. So the only way to make your machine top spec running Snow Leopard would be www.apple.com . Sorry.
really? ok, so what if no snow leaopard, just faster and more powerfull. what could i do? thanks for ur reply.
As far as Macs go, you can only really add RAM and more hard drives. To be honest you'd be better just building a new PC for the amount it'd probably cost, and you'd get a much faster machine if you bought a new one or built a PC (especially as I'm pretty sure you can only expand to 4Gb on your mac) Just for reference, a 500Gb hard drive is £120 (640Gb for £160, and 1Tb for £240) and 4Gb of compatible RAM will be another £100, but both will give you a minimal increase in speed, especially as with music creation, processor speed/cache is more important
£240 for a 1TB harddrive!? In this day and age? Surely there are laws against that? What is so special about an Apple hard drive anyway?
OP how many DIMM slots does it have? 4 or 8? Also I was under the impression those G5s would accept regular SATA hard drives. Hmmm. If not you could still always get a PCI-X RAID card and do some modding
ye accept any sata drive, and sdram is usual. so the answer is no then, theres nothing to chip, change, replace that will beef it up. why cant i buy a Xenon logic board and fit it?
Nothing. They use regular sata drives. I've got the dual 2.5Ghz macpro running in my basement as a media server. It has two 1Tb sata drives and a 500Gb pata drive as the system disk. Didn't need the optical drive. @OP, like all the other guys are saying, it would be cheaper to just get a new system than to try to upgrade this one. 10.5 is as high of an os you'll get on it. 10.6 has no power pc support.
@Aterius Gmork so i could get an intel logic board and fit with a bit of modding..? im running 10.4 on it now, cause its stable and uses less resources. ( i think) got 10.6 on the mac mini
@Aterius Gmork so i could buy an intel board and fit it, with some modding? sata drives work and ram is standard too. running 10.4.11 10.6 on mac mini.
A lot of modding, and a new power supply. Just look at any of the G5 conversion threads here on the forums. By the time you're done you might as well just buy a new computer.
Hackintosh might be your best bet. You can build a very fast pc, then with this bootloader, install a full version of osx with no hacking. Save tons of money over a mac pro, and you still get osx. There's a great episode of the video podcast tekzilla that has all the details titled "Hackintosh Desktop Build" Its an option to consider, and its what my current scratch build will end up running. OSX without the "apple tax". Edit: just a heads up to anyone considering this route, there is a list of supported hardware, and it will only work with what is supported.
cheers guys ill check it out.. maybe the pc hackintosh way will work.. i dont want to spend 1800 pounds on another mac. id pay 5-600 to rebuild or mod my old one, but not a new one.. cheers again.
sorry to be a pain, but i couldnt find anything under g5 conversion, could u kindly, post some links for this information. thanks.
Just look under the "Project Log" section and skim through the titles for G5. Found one here: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=174733
