Well, sad trombone! This is the big, heavy, bad boy I wanted to bring to #MARCHintosh. This was my old G5, it didn’t power on properly, so during this weekend, it got a "new" power supply scavenged from a similar model (many many thanks to @luisfcorreia who proved the hardware and several hours of his weekend!).
However, I finally brought it home and powered it on and, well, this is all it does. Chime, the satisfying fan noise, but nothing else. No video, no boot (no disk seeking sounds).
I've tried shuffling the RAM around but to no avail. When I have more time, I'll clean all the slots and re-seat everything, including the AGP and PCI cards. Also take a CPU out, etc. Let's see if it can join #GlobalTalk this year!
But man, these G5s don't really age well…
Here's a picture of it working during the repair! We fully assembled it afterwards (with both CPUs and all the PCI cards), it booted and survived two openssl speeds running simultaneously. There's hope!
The G5 lives!!!! After removing the two extra PCI cards (USB 2 and Ethernet) it booted just fine! With a catch though. It doesn’t send any signal via DVI, only VGA. I can live with that!
I have an immense amount of cables and adaptors (including a surprisingly high amount of LocalTalk connectors) but naturally neither a second DVI cable nor an ADC to DVI adapter (I think those existed?! Or were they ADC to VGA? Regardless I have neither. So yeah, VGA will have to do! Let’s patch up the machine and see if it boots without the potentially explosive PRAM battery.
It does! No boom for thee. From the many things this Mac can die of, leaking or exploding batteries won’t be one of them.
I’m also slightly apprehensive since the power supply came from a single CPU G5 and is slightly underpowered for this beast, but so far it seems to work fine. I should have some headroom from the PCI slots I’m not using, wifi card not present, nothing plugged to FireWire, and so on. Might unplug the second disk though.
It’s amazing how tech evolves. Each CPU in this thing draws more power idling than the entire M1 Mac mini doing light work. Both CPUs maxed out draw almost 150W! First picture is idling, second is both CPUs being hammered.
@arroz Yeah it’s the worst part about retro computing. I feel proud to use my 25(?) year old G4 Cube but feel guilty that to mix sound as I do it uses 20x more power than say a Pi doing the same.
@santiago And the noise! I just turned everything off because my office is above my neighbours bedroom. The disk sounds like a jack hammer! And the fans are loud even when spinning slowly. I forgot how fans sound like since I upgraded to Apple Silicon!
@arroz Well the cube at least is fanless but it’s so hot I even added a small fan myself with a temperature sensor… and I keep the “engine” separate from the box so air circulates better (but it gets some dust of course).
@arroz Fans annoy me but considering I live in the forest in Rio de Janeiro I very often have the AC on too anyway and also UPS with fans (some of which I partially disconnected) so the only path to “silence” is noise cancellation on AirPods Max.
@arroz how about ram, is all 3GB sticks work?
@arroz well poopsicles :(