kvanderlaag
Well-known member
This has actually been sitting in my closet for...sheesh, probably close to a year now. I just this week hauled it out again to tinker, and the results were...quite pleasing, actually.
I purchased this machine originally to do an ATX motherboard conversion. It cost me a grand total of $80, because the original owner was told that it needed a new logic board. The very first thing I did was strip the machine down to the case - in retrospect, this was a very poor decision. The PO had told me that he'd removed the RAM and hard drive because he was using them in his new machine. This seemed reasonable to me...until I opened the case to see that the optical drive was AWOL, but the 160gb SATA HDD was sitting in the top drive bay nice and pretty. Weird.
Anyways, I gutted the machine and anti-static bagged all the parts, and kind of sat around trying to figure out how I would mount an ATX (or Mini-ITX) board inside the chassis effectively.
It was at about this time that I decided to start selling parts - the first, and only, part to go was the video card, to a fellow whose G5 had failed, he figured, because of the video card. Apparently the GeForce FX5200 had a history of failure...he wasn't convinced that mine was any better. He took it, tried it, and it didn't solve his problem, so he returned it, and I now assumed that the logic board might have been okay, and the video card was at fault.
This prompted me, recently, to try to put it back together and do some more testing. In trying to do so, I realized something. There's a chipset on the back side of the logic board which has a silver heatsink clipped onto it, near the bottom of the board. One of the plastic pegs that holds the heatsink on had broken, and the heatsink was dangling free. I found all the bits, but couldn't get the thing to hold, so I ended up pulling the stock heatsink and replacing it with a copper RAM/GPU heatsink with 3M thermal adhesive on it.
Getting it back together took some tinkering. I decided to use a PCI Radeon 7000 (Mac Edition) to test video. In the process, I put everything together, and then realized that the machine wouldn't power on. LED on the front panel came on, but nothing happened. Service Source said to reseat the processors, so I did, and that cleared up. After that, I forgot that the G5 is really picky about RAM installation. (Matched pairs in matching DIMM slots in each bank, from the center out.) Two of my 512mb RAM modules tested bad, as well, which threw a wrench into things. However, after all of that (with only 512mb of RAM total) the machine actually booted up, to video!
Hooray! My $80 Power Mac G5 was alive.
For giggles, I decided I'd try the FX5200 in the AGP Pro slot again. The guy I 'sold' it to was kind of a knob.
Lo and behold, the GeForce FX5200 worked just fine. Sounds like he had some other problem. Bonus for me, though!
Trying to install 10.4 (from a USB CD drive) was next on the list. Open Firmware picked up the drive fine, booted into the installer...and Disk Utility couldn't see the hard disk. Great. Tried the drive in both drive bays, same problem. Starting to get frustrated, I was now a little worried that I might STILL have a bad logic board, or maybe ESD damage or something.
Nope, nothing so insidious. Now wondering, I pulled the whole machine apart again - CPUs came out, fan banks, power connectors - and popped the power supply's cover plate off. Surprise, surprise... there was the SATA/IDE power harness sitting under the cover, unplugged. Click; looking better. Buttoned everything back up, reinstalled processors, fans, etc, and tried again.
I now have a 1.8GHz DP Power Mac G5 running OS X 10.4. Waiting on 10.5 to finish restoring to a USB drive, and then I'm going to try installing that. Just need some more RAM, maybe an AirPort Extreme card and Bluetooth Module, and I'm laughing.
$80 well spent!
Photos to come.
I purchased this machine originally to do an ATX motherboard conversion. It cost me a grand total of $80, because the original owner was told that it needed a new logic board. The very first thing I did was strip the machine down to the case - in retrospect, this was a very poor decision. The PO had told me that he'd removed the RAM and hard drive because he was using them in his new machine. This seemed reasonable to me...until I opened the case to see that the optical drive was AWOL, but the 160gb SATA HDD was sitting in the top drive bay nice and pretty. Weird.
Anyways, I gutted the machine and anti-static bagged all the parts, and kind of sat around trying to figure out how I would mount an ATX (or Mini-ITX) board inside the chassis effectively.
It was at about this time that I decided to start selling parts - the first, and only, part to go was the video card, to a fellow whose G5 had failed, he figured, because of the video card. Apparently the GeForce FX5200 had a history of failure...he wasn't convinced that mine was any better. He took it, tried it, and it didn't solve his problem, so he returned it, and I now assumed that the logic board might have been okay, and the video card was at fault.
This prompted me, recently, to try to put it back together and do some more testing. In trying to do so, I realized something. There's a chipset on the back side of the logic board which has a silver heatsink clipped onto it, near the bottom of the board. One of the plastic pegs that holds the heatsink on had broken, and the heatsink was dangling free. I found all the bits, but couldn't get the thing to hold, so I ended up pulling the stock heatsink and replacing it with a copper RAM/GPU heatsink with 3M thermal adhesive on it.
Getting it back together took some tinkering. I decided to use a PCI Radeon 7000 (Mac Edition) to test video. In the process, I put everything together, and then realized that the machine wouldn't power on. LED on the front panel came on, but nothing happened. Service Source said to reseat the processors, so I did, and that cleared up. After that, I forgot that the G5 is really picky about RAM installation. (Matched pairs in matching DIMM slots in each bank, from the center out.) Two of my 512mb RAM modules tested bad, as well, which threw a wrench into things. However, after all of that (with only 512mb of RAM total) the machine actually booted up, to video!
Hooray! My $80 Power Mac G5 was alive.
For giggles, I decided I'd try the FX5200 in the AGP Pro slot again. The guy I 'sold' it to was kind of a knob.
Lo and behold, the GeForce FX5200 worked just fine. Sounds like he had some other problem. Bonus for me, though!
Trying to install 10.4 (from a USB CD drive) was next on the list. Open Firmware picked up the drive fine, booted into the installer...and Disk Utility couldn't see the hard disk. Great. Tried the drive in both drive bays, same problem. Starting to get frustrated, I was now a little worried that I might STILL have a bad logic board, or maybe ESD damage or something.
Nope, nothing so insidious. Now wondering, I pulled the whole machine apart again - CPUs came out, fan banks, power connectors - and popped the power supply's cover plate off. Surprise, surprise... there was the SATA/IDE power harness sitting under the cover, unplugged. Click; looking better. Buttoned everything back up, reinstalled processors, fans, etc, and tried again.
I now have a 1.8GHz DP Power Mac G5 running OS X 10.4. Waiting on 10.5 to finish restoring to a USB drive, and then I'm going to try installing that. Just need some more RAM, maybe an AirPort Extreme card and Bluetooth Module, and I'm laughing.
$80 well spent!
Photos to come.
