G5 towers, Life After Death

phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
110
136
43
If you followed January's PPC Challenge, you would have seen me acquire multiple PPC machines, including:
-$5 G5 Dual 1.8GHz non booting (it had a V2 and V1 CPU mismatch, no GPU), Free Geek Minneapolis
-$10 G5 Dual 2.5GHz non booting (dead PSU, leaking LCS), Free Geek Minneapolis
-$10 G5 Quad 2.5GHz non booting (powers on then dies, LCS intact), Free Geek Minneapolis
Dual1800-5dollars.jpg


Additional parts purchased:
-$25 extra G5 PSU, eBay
-$16 extra 1.8GHz CPU (ended up being a V3), eBay
-$7 power cord for quad G5 (special plug), eBay
-$35 extra 1.8GHz CPU (V2 to match one of the other randos), eBay
-$13 G5 dual CPU (1/2 of a quad), eBay

I disassembled the 2.5 dual LCS and soaked and cleaned the CPUs. I then put them on air coolers and got some mixed results. Even tried the 2.5 in the 1.8 motherboard. After too much messing around I gave up and called it a loss.

Received my 1.8v2 a couple days ago, and finally have a matching pair of 1.8, so put them into the 1.8 motherboard (assumed it has the solder flex issue, but further testing is still needed), and I got it to boot up.
LAD-dual18.jpg


Feeling lucky, I tried the 2.5 air cooled back in the 2.5 motherboard, and it actually fired up this time.
LAD-dual25.jpg


Restarted with the ASD cd to attempt the thermal calibration due to no LCS installed.
LAD-thermal.jpg


CPUs looked good, to ran the thermal calibration, but got some fan errors.
LAD-fans.jpg


Ran it a couple more times and suddenly I was greeted with a horrendous sound.... oops, the fan I broke and mended gave way to failure!
thebondicway.jpg


So there may be some life after death for two of these dual G5 machines. I am in the process of rebuilding the LCS for the quad, to see if I can get some life out of that one as well. I am pretty sure one of the CPU cards is faulty, so eBay'd a spare for $13.

Xbench comparisons on CPU tests only on 10.5.8 for the dual 2.5 and dual 1.8.
LAD-compare.jpg
 
Last edited:

phunguss

Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
110
136
43
I pulled the rear fan from the dual 1.8 and put it on the air cooled dual 2.5. Ran the ASD for everything but the CPU, that passed.
DG5-25-AHT-all.jpg

Then ran the CPU tests, passed.
DG5-25-AHT-CPU.jpg

Then ran the thermal calibration... did not finish after an hour, assumed it was frozen... restarted and the fans were quieter... so it must have done something. Booted into 10.4.11 and ran CineBench 11
DG5-25-cb11.jpg


Both CPUs working. Booted into 10.5.8 and ran CB11 again as well as Xbench
DG5-25-xbench.jpg


I shall dub thee Lazarus Dual2.5