Found an $8 ATI Radeon 5750, $7 Palm m515 and $7 HP iPaq Pocket PC 2003.

[mac-man6]

I was walking through a local thrift store and found a large anti-static bag. I quickly checked the specs and it seemed better than the video card in my first Hackintosh/gaming PC (9800GT). I got it home and it works great, not a bad card and it seems like it was used in other macs so I should be able to use it with OSX. 

A bit farther back I was in a different thrift store and was just looking around and saw these two devices in plastic bags. Both came with the styluses, SD cards and carrying cases. The palm even came PalmPak Dictionary/Thesaurus Card, Games Card, Travel Card: US Cities and Backup Card. Unfortunately I misplaced palm cradle or e-wasted it and the HP iPaq has its own cables.

Not so bad for $22 CAD.

 

[Byrd]

That's a nice lot 'o gadgets, the Radeon 5750 should be able to be flashed to a Mac EFI ROM to obtain boot screens if used in a Mac Pro.  Pocket/Palm PCs are great little collectables IMO and you can get them for pretty much nothing at the moment.  They're also pretty reliable and with some searching there are some decent apps you can try on them.

 

[bibilit]

Found a Palm M105 myself a couple of weeks ago for 1 €, working without issue, only needed a pair of AAA batteries

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I'm currently trying to replace the 5750 in my 5,1 with a 1080Ti... It's quite a bit faster  . 

But it's a nice deal you got there

 

[mac-man6]

That's a nice lot 'o gadgets, the Radeon 5750 should be able to be flashed to a Mac EFI ROM to obtain boot screens if used in a Mac Pro.  Pocket/Palm PCs are great little collectables IMO and you can get them for pretty much nothing at the moment.  They're also pretty reliable and with some searching there are some decent apps you can try on them.

I'd love to boot the device and just see what's installed but I don't have any adapters to do so. Here's a cool review of a newer iPaq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm5omDCENPo. 

I do have a PowerMac G5, would it be compatible?

I'm currently trying to replace the 5750 in my 5,1 with a 1080Ti... It's quite a bit faster  . 

But it's a nice deal you got there

I was thinking of getting an older cheese grater intel Mac Pro and putting in a modern car. ECC ram seems really cheap and a lot of those Mac Pros are still supported in the latest versions OSX. What put me off was the used prices for a 6-10 year old computer and the video card being bottlenecked by the CPU. None of those Mac Pro are PCI-E version3. How's your experience with a 1080 TI? 

 

[Franklinstein]

I do have a PowerMac G5, would it be compatible?

Nope. PowerPC support for new video cards basically stopped at the X1900 series. nVidia cards topped out at the 7 series and the Quadro FX 4500.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

@mac-man6. I don’t have the right mini 6 pin to full size 8 pin adapter yet. It should be in my mailbox either today or tomorrow. And without it the card doesn’t work. 

Apple released new firmwares for the 5,1: 138.0.0.0.0 enables pcie 2.0 speeds in windows and macOS, which is way better than 1.1! The 1080Ti is certainly going to benefit from that. There’s also 139.0.0.0.0 and 140.0.0.0.0. I’m running HS because you can’t use a nvidia card with Mojave (for now). That’s kind of a bummer. Also, the 5,1 can’t officially run win 10 and HS broke some Bootcamp commands and the windows partition can’t be used to install windows. You need to modify it using gdisk. It’s quite a convoluted process but I got there eventually. 

Sorry for hijacking your thread btw...  

 

[mac-man6]

@mac-man6. I don’t have the right mini 6 pin to full size 8 pin adapter yet. It should be in my mailbox either today or tomorrow. And without it the card doesn’t work. 

Apple released new firmwares for the 5,1: 138.0.0.0.0 enables pcie 2.0 speeds in windows and macOS, which is way better than 1.1! The 1080Ti is certainly going to benefit from that. There’s also 139.0.0.0.0 and 140.0.0.0.0. I’m running HS because you can’t use a nvidia card with Mojave (for now). That’s kind of a bummer. Also, the 5,1 can’t officially run win 10 and HS broke some Bootcamp commands and the windows partition can’t be used to install windows. You need to modify it using gdisk. It’s quite a convoluted process but I got there eventually. 

Sorry for hijacking your thread btw...  

I was thinking about it and then I did the numbers comparing a used mac, with used ram, SSD and modern card vs. brand new build with a Ryzen and modern card. Your observations saved me a bunch of googling!

 

[BadGoldEagle]

And it's not finished. The card "works" (I may or may not have power issues, but I set the max temperature to 70°C which effectively under clocks it so it's okay). 

I'll post a new thread on this site probably tonight... It may help someone in the future, who knows...

 

[Unknown_K]

@mac-man6. I don’t have the right mini 6 pin to full size 8 pin adapter yet. It should be in my mailbox either today or tomorrow. And without it the card doesn’t work. 

Apple released new firmwares for the 5,1: 138.0.0.0.0 enables pcie 2.0 speeds in windows and macOS, which is way better than 1.1! The 1080Ti is certainly going to benefit from that. There’s also 139.0.0.0.0 and 140.0.0.0.0. I’m running HS because you can’t use a nvidia card with Mojave (for now). That’s kind of a bummer. Also, the 5,1 can’t officially run win 10 and HS broke some Bootcamp commands and the windows partition can’t be used to install windows. You need to modify it using gdisk. It’s quite a convoluted process but I got there eventually. 

Sorry for hijacking your thread btw...  

Look at these benchmarks for the 1080 (non ti) running on a PCIE fro 1.1 x4 to 3.0 x16

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/7.html

You notice a major slowdown using the card in a x4 PCIE 1 slot and that's about it. Reminds me of AGP slots 1x, 2x, 4, 8x where the bandwidth of the older slots didn't really affect performance. 

Any full X16 PCIE slot should do.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Humm... Very interesting. It doesn't seem pcie 1.1 affects performance THAT much... It depends on the game of course. But that's not bad.

Today I fixed the main issue with my build. Here's a link to the Apple Discussions thread I created a couple of days ago. If any of you are interested...

This is the last time I hijack your thread. So @mac-man6, I didn't quite get what you went for? Did you go for the cMP or for a new PC? I can't stand non-Apple hardware (call me a fanboy if you want but I find everything else rather ghastly, especially if it has RGB which it seems you can't really live without nowadays...) so this was easy for me, I went for the cMP.

I've checked online and that ATI card is still worth a fortune. I don't quite get that because it's pretty old and not very fast... You might want to sell it and turn a big profit if you don't plan on using it. I know what I'll do with mine  }

 

[mac-man6]

Look at these benchmarks for the 1080 (non ti) running on a PCIE fro 1.1 x4 to 3.0 x16

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/7.html

You notice a major slowdown using the card in a x4 PCIE 1 slot and that's about it. Reminds me of AGP slots 1x, 2x, 4, 8x where the bandwidth of the older slots didn't really affect performance. 

Any full X16 PCIE slot should do.

Wow, that helps a lot! I thought I would seriously limit the card and not get the benefit in a PCI-e 2.0 x16 slot. It seems like max, I'd only lose a handful of frames. 

Humm... Very interesting. It doesn't seem pcie 1.1 affects performance THAT much... It depends on the game of course. But that's not bad.

Today I fixed the main issue with my build. Here's a link to the Apple Discussions thread I created a couple of days ago. If any of you are interested...

This is the last time I hijack your thread. So @mac-man6, I didn't quite get what you went for? Did you go for the cMP or for a new PC? I can't stand non-Apple hardware (call me a fanboy if you want but I find everything else rather ghastly, especially if it has RGB which it seems you can't really live without nowadays...) so this was easy for me, I went for the cMP.

I've checked online and that ATI card is still worth a fortune. I don't quite get that because it's pretty old and not very fast... You might want to sell it and turn a big profit if you don't plan on using it. I know what I'll do with mine  }

I didn't make any decisions. I was just seeing what would work best. But after seeing that website, I think I'll just sit with what I have and only upgrade the video card. I really should play through the games I have but the main push would be to play the latest Wolfenstein game. I have an i5-2500, 16gb of RAM, 256gb SSD and 750ti. $400 won't really get me much better of a system. But maybe I'll wait for the price of new GPUs and the game to drop some more. I really like the New Order and Old Blood.

I have some older towers and I shuffled the cards to match the CPUs. I should be able to host a decent lane party with some buds and a 

• Xeon 3210 & Radeon 5750 (slower processor but better PSU with 6 pin power)
  
• e6300 &  9800 GT (Lenovo case, doesn't have 6 pin power for 5750 so it gets the lower-power 9800gt)
  
• i5-2500 & 750ti. 
  

I think Left4Dead 2, CounterStrike and some RTS should play very well on them.