Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)

[raphaelbruegger]

Dear colleagues

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to get a Power Mac G5 4 x 2.5 GHz for free. Since I work as a graphic designer, I like to «rescue» older Macs and make them running like new.

As I never worked with a G5, I have a few questions…:

• Can I run a 1 TB SSD in this Mac?
• Are there PCI AHCI SSDs availabe for this Mac without modding the system? (10.5.8)
• What is the best graficcard I can get, without modding the system?

Thanks for your help. Cheers from Switzerland. Raphi

 

[eyoungren]

You have a Quad, the fastest Mac Apple made in the G5 line. It's upgradeable to 16GB ram.

It takes SATA II drives, backwards compatible to SATA 1. If you have a SATA III drive you'll have to jumper it down to SATA II.

Drive capacity is only limited by the size of SATA drives, but if you want 4TB or more to be recognized the drive needs to be formatted as GUID. It's possible to boot from GUID formatted drives (as compared to APM formatted).

The Radeon X1900 XT and the NVDIA FX4500 Quadro are the two highest end cards available for this system.

You've made a good choice. As a Graphic Designer and an owner of a Quad myself I put it to use with Adobe CS4 (the max suite a PowerPC Mac can run).

Click on the "6 Displays" part of my signature to see my Quad and my 2.3DC G5 (Quad is on top).

 

[z970]

If you have a SATA III drive you'll have to jumper it down to SATA II

*SATA I, or the mode that limits operation to 1.5GBs as it is a SATA I machine. Jumpering the drive to cable select mode will also work.

Drive capacity is only limited by the size of SATA drives, but if you want 4GB or more to be recognized the drive needs to be formatted as GUID.

What? OS X will recognize a 1 TB APM-formatted drive without issue. It does not need to be formatted as GUID, especially if you expect to boot off it from other PowerPC Macs. Pre-2005 models will not boot from GUID drives.

 

[Project Alice]

*SATA I, or the mode that limits operation to 1.5GBs as it is a SATA I machine. Jumpering the drive to cable select mode will also work.



What? OS X will recognize a 1 TB APM-formatted drive without issue. It does not need to be formatted as GUID, especially if you expect to boot off it from other PowerPC Macs. Pre-2005 models will not boot from GUID drives.

I think he meant 4TB.
APM caps out at 2TB I think. Idk why he’d want to boot from another PPC Mac though. Might as well use GPT if installing a disk that big.

 

[eyoungren]

*SATA I, or the mode that limits operation to 1.5GBs as it is a SATA I machine. Jumpering the drive to cable select mode will also work.



What? OS X will recognize a 1 TB APM-formatted drive without issue. It does not need to be formatted as GUID, especially if you expect to boot off it from other PowerPC Macs. Pre-2005 models will not boot from GUID drives.

Booting a GUID disk on PowerPC Macs

I Just made a very cool discovery while playing around in OpenFirmware on my G5 Quad that I think is worth sharing which is that its OpenFirmware implementation can read disks with GUID partition schemes! after discovering this I quickly cloned Leopard onto a GUID disk and I was able to boot...

forums.macrumors.com

[automerge]1568898050[/automerge]

I think he meant 4TB.
APM caps out at 2TB I think. Idk why he’d want to boot from another PPC Mac though. Might as well use GPT if installing a disk that big.

Yeah, I meant 4TB.

I have a 4TB secondary drive on my Quad. It had to be formatted GUID.

 

[AphoticD]

I have a few G5s including the Quad. Max out the RAM if you like (I did), but realistically, 8GB is probably more than it will ever need. The RAM disk tool @eyoungren put me onto has a limit of 2GB in Leopard, which is handy to speed up regular file/app access or even to use as scratch for PS or in audio recording.

The FX4500 is the best GPU, but even the stock 6600 is a decent performer for its time.

I haven’t had any problems with using a 256GB mSATA SSD as a boot drive and a 1TB HDD for project files. The G5 can handle a hefty workload, especially the Quad!

In terms of PCIe SSDs, there are no bootable options (for OSX), but I believe Leopard will handle AHCI compliant storage devices just fine once booted.