Can I upgrade my power Mac G5 to modern parts?

I have clients who use the older Powermac G5's because they need to run older software on OSX 10.2, 10.4 or 10.5 operating systems,

Panther, Tiger, Leopard. They might have a lot of Protools plugins they purchased or invested in other software that works just fine on these

very well made older PowerMac G5.

You can install up to a 2.2 Gigahertz hard drive. I am told hard drives over 2 Gigabytes will not work because of the limitations of the partition map

on these PowerPCs. I have actually never tried installing anything over 1 Terabyte.

Here is some information i gathered from previous forum on hard drive limitations of the Power Mac G5

Your G5 will support larger than 500 GB drives; 500 GB was the largest offered at the time of sale is all.

1TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB drives are no problem in the G5, but larger than 2.2 TB breaks a capacity limit for APM (Apple Partition Map in formatting is required for boot in a PPC Mac). For use of a 3 TB or 4 TB drive, partition the drive so that no 1 partition is larger than 2 TB. The drive should then have all space available.

Otherwise, for storage only, using Tiger or Leopard, format GPT. These drives (formatted with GPT) are not bootable in a PPC Mac; G3, G4 or G5.

One other potential issue to consider is SATA 3 Gb/s (SATA rev. 2) and SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA rev. 3) related.

The SATA rev. 1 controller of the G5 works well with SATA rev. 2 drives, but is not so friendly with SATA rev. 3 drives. SATA rev. 3 drives from Hitachi (7K series) typically work as is. Drives from Western Digital (Black and Blue series) require a jumper on pins 5 and 6 to limit a SATA 6 Gb/s drive to SATA 3 Gb/s to work well in a G5. If not jumped, the drive is typically not seen.

You can upgrade your PowerMac G5 to the following specifications:

• RAM: 8-16GB (Depending on which model you have.)
• HDD: Unlimited
• MB: Why do need to upgrade the motherboard?
• CPU: Sadly, due to the difference in architecture and socket types, you cannot install an Intel processor.

There really is no use for a G5 except as a space heater or scrap aluminium.

They are very inefficient and hot to be used as a home server, they are not powerful enough to play 1080p video to be used as a media center and they are not powerful enough to play 3D games at good framerates (even with the ATI X1900 video card). They have little value, even the top-of-the-line Quad G5 would struggle to pull in $400 on craigslist and a bottom-end quad 2.0GHz Mac Pro of the same price will walk all over it in every single catagory.

Have to disagree here, I have a G5 (dual CPU 1.8Ghz) as my home server, it is on 24/7 (but I give it sleep/wake cycles as scheduled) and It stores all my music, pictures, ripped DVD and HD video from iTunes. And I don't find that it gets too hot, or too noisy. It is a remarkable machine that has handled everything I have thrown at it so far. Though I don't output HD video through it, its a server box so no monitor, keyboard or mouse.

In response to the original question, you can add an additional SATA HDD, it will take 2 without mod and there is no limit on size of drive, mine has a 2Tb SATA drive in there very hapily.

I'm very happy with my G5 as I only paid £22 for it, a windows PC would be far more trouble where it comes to networking, though it on Leopard, it plays very well with my other Apples on Mavericks (screen sharing is very sweet!). Only downside is the inability to have my most up to date iTunes library running on it full time.

stevefromashby-de-la-zouch wrote:

And I don't find that it gets too hot, or too noisy. It is a remarkable machine that has handled everything I have thrown at it so far. Though I don't output HD video through it, its a server box so no monitor, keyboard or mouse.

How much energy does it use compared to a Mac Mini?

Welcome milagromac!

Did you notice the original post is over a year old? The current forum software does not auto-archive "dead" posts any more so we all have to look at the date a thread was posted now. I susect the fine old G5 in this one has already been turned into beer cans!

Apart from RAM, no. A new motherboard would cost nearly the same as a new Mac.

Step one, recycle the antique computer.

Step two, buy a new computer.

Done.

To be honest, I'm not bothered enough to put a monitor on it.