Overclocking a G5

Hi there, the G5 overclock is out, nobody has done it yet, it's controlled by special chips for the G5 CPUs.

Depends on Video card, but generally reuires a PC to do it, here's one clue on ATI cards, not much, but a start...

http://x704.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38&p=46526&hilit=ati%26%26overclock#p46526

You not only risk breaking your G5. You may risk your life if a fire breaks out.

Yes some G5s have been known to overheat. They use a special cooling liquid for 2.3 Ghz and faster G5s. Fans are specially timed to keep them from overheating.

Know how to put out electrical fires which are different from regular fires.

Be careful!

Hi Sjors,

The G5 are clocked up already! I take it you are from a PC background?

One of the features of Macs is the whole unit is matched, bus speeds, processor speeds etc. even if you did clock up the processor by adding an external chip, the user experience would not be likely to be much different.

If you want to increase the performance of this computer, max out the RAM, fit the fastest Video card you can find, and fit a couple of WD black 1Tb drives. You would then have a faster, reliable, powerful workhorse.

Great post/advice! 🙂

Thank you! 🙂

😀

Keep up the good work me bud, much appreciated! 🙂

Build a PC. Windows 7 isn't that bad or that much different today. And easy to do. Even a Mac Pro today but, without access to EFI firmware which is where all real overclocking happens, limited.

Invest in some SSDs. The trouble is the early 1.8 era G5s don't always benefit from your best disk drives (a 3rd party controller that is bootable might help). The WD 640GB tends to be best for the buck.

There are lots of threads on video cards, where to find flashed Mac compatible versions.

The G5's memory bandwidth and front side bus never did live up to the potential or hype, and fell halfway there, in part due to decision to drop L3 and high latency that always results (you'll find 8MB on today's Intel chips).

I think it is much more interesting to build your own, more appreciation and knowing you did it. Mac has never had cheap or abundant choices in graphics.

i did something similar to you. I had a MacBook Air and a PowerMac G3. But my primary computer was a Q6600 9800GTX SLi. Which is a great computer, but it's powered by windows vista.

I decided to go out and buy an old PowerMac G5 1.6GHz.

From all that I know. It is impossible to changed the front bus speed of the PowerMacs. It may be possible to change the jumpers on the G5 and overclock it, but I haven't looked into it.

Your main problem is your ram. You only have 1.5gbs Which by todays standard is rather small. I think these G5s can hold only 4 gigs.

Your best bet is to get a new graphic card. That 5200 Ultra is killing you. What I did was buy a PC 6800Ultra and flashed it to mac. The only problem is that the DVI will not work. Since the DVI on the PC is different from the DDL DVI used by the mac.

You can find more about this at http://themacelite.wikidot.com/start