2026 PowerPC Challenge, is it happening?

joevt · Tuesday at 5:34 AM

Certificate of Excellence said:
I currently have the card populated in a 4 lane pcie slot but I do have access to an 8 lane slot. Maybe I'll stick it in there this week and see what xbench says.

Interestingly, the card doesnt show up as pcie, rather under PCI>bridge at 2.5Gigabit speed (see above), so with the advertised maximum read speed of the msata at 500mb sec & the advertised OWC accelsior pcie card read speed of 380mb sec, I assume it is saturating the pcie1 4 lane bus at up to 250mb sec per lane? It seems to me that the bottleneck here would be the gen 1 pcie 8lane vs 4lane slot. I should see an improvement in throughput using the 8 lane slot vs 4 lane. We'll see!

Are you sure the SATA controller is not the one in SLOT-2? ASMedia (1b21) ASM1060 is a SATA controller PCIe 2.0 x1.
The bridge chip says the connection is only 1 lane so putting it in a x8 slot is not going to improve things (unless that slot is closer to the CPU?). You'll always be limited to 250 MB/s (PCIe 1.0 single lane). To get more speed, you would need to connect the card to a PCIe 2.0 bridge.

The PCI tab in System Information.app is not very useful because it doesn't list all PCI devices and doesn't show the hierarchy of devices. A dump from ioreg may be more informative. You can also try my pcitree.sh script which requires my pciutils fork and DirectHW fork.
https://gist.github.com/joevt/e3cd4ff08aae06279134969c98ca3ab7

phunguss · Tuesday at 5:43 PM

Day 6: (we've only just begun)

I ran the Thermal Calibration on the dual 1.8 Unit A last night and it failed.

Swapped out a processor from the "flaky" B unit and ran the tcal again this morning with success!

Also installed Panther 10.3

Both CPUs are recognized. Benchmarked with GB 2.20 PPC, about a 50% increase from the previous single CPU score.

I also fired up Unit C, a dual 2.5GHz water cooled that was converted to air cooled last year, and it had both an SSD and DVD drive in it and it works completely. So no work required on that one.

Unit B will like become a parts donor or a single CPU 1.8. Unit C and D will take some more work.

Arbystpossum · Tuesday at 7:16 PM

I can't think of anything neat to do with my old PPC Macs, I've been doing some simple website things on a G3 powerbook, I also found a G4 iMac that has a cat pee problem that I'm taking apart and cleaning, but feel like I've done everything with my other Macs. Maybe I'll see if I can get 9.2.2 in the G4 iMac, do some stuff on it. I love reading what other people do though, absolute madness sometimes.

Certificate of Excellence · Tuesday at 11:03 PM

joevt said:
Are you sure the SATA controller is not the one in SLOT-2? ASMedia (1b21) ASM1060 is a SATA controller PCIe 2.0 x1.
The bridge chip says the connection is only 1 lane so putting it in a x8 slot is not going to improve things (unless that slot is closer to the CPU?). You'll always be limited to 250 MB/s (PCIe 1.0 single lane). To get more speed, you would need to connect the card to a PCIe 2.0 bridge.

The PCI tab in System Information.app is not very useful because it doesn't list all PCI devices and doesn't show the hierarchy of devices. A dump from ioreg may be more informative. You can also try my pcitree.sh script which requires my pciutils fork and DirectHW fork.
https://gist.github.com/joevt/e3cd4ff08aae06279134969c98ca3ab7

You are correct again. I switched my Motu PCIE sound card/interface with the Accelsior M. Here's Sys pref witout the motu.

Here's the prior sys pref for comparison with the Accelsior M in slot 2

Do you have any recommendations for a pcie2 bridge? Anyhow, I have to fly and go cook dinner for three hangry kids and Mom.
.
.
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With family fed, a quick clone and switched the boot drive to the Accelsior msata. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to boot. It shows as a boot volume in syspref>startup (cloned my Sorbet install to it) but upon reboot, you get the folder of doom. Apple boot picker only shows the Sorbet and Leopard partitions on the preexisting sata SSD. That's unfortunate but dems da breaks. I wonder if it needs a firmware update that Im not aware of. I'll leave it in here for now but I think I might put this thing in my cMP. I have two of them actually, so clone the current cMP boot array over to two pcie Accelsior msata (my current setup via two sata ssds) and see if it boots. OWC says this should be bootable so there's that lol. Anyhow, that would be neat

joevt · 2026-01-07T03:25:40+0000

Certificate of Excellence said:
I switched my Motu PCIE sound card/interface with the Accelsior M. Here's Sys pref witout the motu.
Here's the prior sys pref for comparison with the Accelsior M in slot 2

So pci137a,5 is probably connected to the pci-bridge. The bridge is a "XIO2000(A)/XIO2200A PCI Express-to-PCI Bridge" which means pci137a,5 is a PCI controller instead of a PCIe controller.

Certificate of Excellence said:
I switched the boot drive to the Accelsior msata and unfortunately, I was not able to get it to boot. It shown as a boot volume in syspref>startup (cloned my Sorbet install to it) but upon reboot, you get the folder of doom. Boot picker only shows the Sorbet and Leopard partitions on the existing sata SSD.

The Accelsior probably doesn't have an Open Firmware fcode image in the PCI Option ROM?
Apple never made an AHCI Open Firmware driver (unless one of their chips supports AHCI?)
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-open-firmware-wiki.2225024/post-33189980

Certificate of Excellence said:
Do you have any recommendations for a pcie2 bridge? Anyhow, I have to fly and go cook dinner for three hangry kids and Mom.

Netstor NA255A has a PCIe 3 bridge. It should work but I think it doesn't in my Quad G5. I can get it to work in my B&W G3 with a PCI to PCIe bridge.
The Netstor is super expensive.

There's a list of "PCIe x8 & x16 switch cards" with multiple M.2 slots at
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/
You can get M.2 to PCIe adapters to connect PCIe cards. This is super janky.

Basically, you want SATA controllers that are behind a PCIe bridge on a PCIe card. Multi function PCIe cards that support USB or FireWire + SATA will have PCIe bridges.
For SATA III, you need at least 4 lanes from the bridge. You can find PCIe SATA controllers with 4 lanes.
Be careful though, some x4 (physical) PCIe cards are actually x2 (electrical). They will be limited to < 500 MB/s, or 250 MB/s if the G5 doesn't support x2.

PowerRCP-G3 · 2026-01-07T06:04:11+0000

Day 6: Wanted to do a simple test on the PowerBook G4 12-Inch while the G5 continues processing the clip.

phunguss · 2026-01-08T01:28:18+0000

Day 7: Thanks for the memories!

I stopped at Free Geek Minneapolis to have a gander. I picked up 4x1G PC3200U for my G5 units A & C, bringing them up to 4GB and 7GB. I also grabbed 4x2GB PC2-6400 for my G5 Quad, bringing that up to 11GB.

I saw a $5 Sony Mavica CD1000 camera, one I have been looking for. Untested, as-is, no returns. No battery, no power supply. I took the chance. Got home and it powered up fine. But it didn't like the mini DVD-Rs that I had, so I ordered some CD-R and CD-RW off eBay to try later. Just add this to my Mavica Collection.

MVC-CD1000 (mini-CD), MVC-FD85 Floppy, MVC-FD100 Floppy, MVC-FD81 Floppy. All in working condition with batteries. I only have the single power supply, but I know i have a Sony Mini-DV camcorder that the power supply may work on these cameras.

Back to the G5s. I was working on Unit B (Dual 1.8GHz marked Flaky from last year), and it is giving me three blinks, so bad ram. Swapped around a lot, but no love. I am guessing it is Flex-Gate where the ram or some other components have micro solder breaks. I will likely have to remove the logic board and see if I can reflow the joints.

One possible cure is to leave it on (or heat up the logic board with a hot air or hairdryer)... then restart. That did it for short while. I could get the boot screen with Option key held. ASD would not boot. But I got 10.4 and 10.5 to boot and benchmark, only recognizing a single CPU. I do have two other spare 1.8GHz cpu boards, so I may juggle those around a bit as well in the future.

No further luck with the dual 2.3 listed as Unit E. Unit D is my 2.5GHz Quad, which needs some work on the liquid cooler before I can reassemble it and test further.

Trash80toG4 · 2026-01-08T01:40:17+0000

SATA/PATA card and better VidCard for the MDD came in today. Found the DVI to HDMI cable I'll need on the bench . . .
. . . but how the hell do you run out of male to male USB-A to USB-A cables!?!

Certificate of Excellence · 2026-01-08T02:08:52+0000

Nice TOTC Sony collection - great score on the CD1000! I have a modest Sony Maciva/cybershot collection (just two lol)

I’ve had the cybershot DSC-S30 above since new, Christmas 2000. It was a gift from my grandpa. I love that camera

.

I later got the Mavica as part of a trade around 2010ish (?) - musician buddy of mine owed me some money & was tight himself so offered that up as trade, which I took him up on.

These are a lot of fun

Trash80toG4 said:
Trash80toG4 said:

SATA/PATA card and better VidCard for the MDD came in today. Found the DVI to HDMI cable I'll need on the bench . . .
. . . but how the hell do you run out of male to male USB-A to USB-A cables!?!

Click to expand...

I don’t think you do. I think you’ve hidden them from yourself. I do it all the time

PowerRCP-G3 · 2026-01-08T04:47:36+0000

Day 7: The wait is over and my overly long video project is finally finished! It took awhile, but it was worth it. I also have other plans for the G5.

Trash80toG4 · 2026-01-08T05:39:13+0000

Certificate of Excellence said:
I don’t think you do. I think you’ve hidden them from yourself. I do it all the time

Dunno about that, I seem to have every other sort of USB cable hanging off a lamp I use as a cord tree, but not the basic one, all those are in use apparently? Two six footers in overnight for seven bucks.

. . . and if another one pops up in the next week or so I ain't lettin' anyone in on the news!

Certificate of Excellence · 2026-01-08T16:00:10+0000

Sounds good

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2026 PowerPC Challenge, is it happening?

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