Damn!!! If this blog had any thicker a layer of dust coating it, then there is a good chance I would be sneezing hard enough to blow this here 20-something inch Studio Display clean off the desk! But I digress...
It's now 2015 and after an absolute rollercoaster ride, I am now back in a position where I may pick up where I left off and resume this here blog, and more importantly, the Mac hobby that sort of is the reason it exists. :) A bit has happened in the meatspace in that time, much of which is not really relevant to the subject matter but does nonetheless explain my sudden drop away into oblivion.
The above being said, there have been a few changes made which are VERY relevant to the primary subject matter of this blog, the most exciting, at least for me, being that I now type these words under 64-bit power. Yep, a G5 has entered my life! :) And I have to say, it is every bit as awsome as I imagined it to be a bit over 10 years ago when the first multiple thousand dollar lumps of anodised aluminium and raw power cam onto the market. Unfortunately however, it was not without succumbing to some issues that showed themselves very early in the life of these machines...
Pretty much as it stands, not long after my last blog post, the old faithful Pentium 4 2.8Ghz I had been gaming on and computing with semi-daily since 2003 finally refused to boot one day. For what it's worth I put it entirely down to malware due to my oldest younger brothers disturbing high-school porn habit... But that being said, I simply cannot find the motivation to deal with it. I simply unplugged the machine and havent switched it on since. At least that way I can't break anymore data. This seemed fine to me... the only reason I used it was because it was somewhat faster and more fluid than the old trusty Yikes G4 tower. Unfortunately however, Porsche-syndrome had well and truly set in and I must concede to feeling pretty hard done by as I sat back and waited for Firefox or Camino to load what remaining supported content was on my usual assortment of web-pages. It seemed to me the time had finally come to retire the strung out, loaded up, maxxed out old graphite boat-anchor that had provided so many years of computing pleasure to menial jukebox duties... It was just no longer practical for even simple web-browsing after 14 years, which I must admit is a great service life nonetheless!
Well, at a very opportune point in time shortly after, a Powermac G5 entered my life. At a friends house one day, I was asked if I had any use for their glitchy 2.0DP, which had gone to the dogs after a RAM upgrade and been replaced with an iMac G5... Being the enterprising Powermac afficionado and Mac collector I am, and being at a point where buying a newer Mac was now a definite must, I needless to say was more than willing to take it off their hands. I set it and it's 20" Studio Display up on my glass topped desk and was immediately confronted with.... a desktop picture and the MacOS interface. Brilliant! However it was when i opened up About this Mac to do the routine scan of the system profiler to ascertain specifics, I noted it was registering only a single CPU... at that it was also painfully slow. At that point i wasted no time in opening it up and discovered the cause immediately... all the ram was stacked in one bank rather than paired in top and bottom banks. By rights it shouldnt have actually worked at all, but it did. After rectifying this, I got a much faster boot and it now registered both CPU's... I was onto a winner it seemed until that kernel panic. I reset it and then next came a freeze during boot. Off came the side again, and after much swapping and experimenting I ascertained not one but 2 of the RAM's were bad... maybe not even bad but simply not of a quality or specification that a G5 will reliably run. They are a fickle beast when it comes to such things. After removing the bad DDR400's it booted, ran brilliantly, and was a great daily until a little while ago it started sporadically freezing. The freezes got more frequent, then became KP's... swapping RAM into different slots sometimes helped, but the problems came back every time. Then the fan's started going nuts...
That there fan development was the telltale sign that I was no longer chasing cheap RAM problems, but a more serious logic board failure, common particularly in earlier G5's. They came to be in the world at a time when a few new developments were being implemented in consumer electronics and computing... the Ball-Grid Array method of microprocessor interfacing, and low-lead solder. Whilst there are benefits to both of these developments both from a functional and manufacturing standpoint, they are not without their flaws, and these showed themselves very early in the Powermac G5's life. the BGA interface in the G5 is prone to cracking of the less compliant and less conductive low-lead solder joints on the ball-grid due to thermal expansion, which resulted in the kind of instability I found myself facing. This can be rectified by reflowing the affected joints, however I opted to go with the simpler option of purchasing another G5. Finding a decent one for a good price that was not too far to pick up however was a slightly long-winded excercise however, and in the meantime, I took my wireless LAN card out of the crippled G5, stuck it in the Yikes, and then set about beating it into submission at least to allow internettage whilst I bided my time... TenFourFox was not at all stable, Safari was useless in this time and place, so I found myself settling upon an old forgotten install of Camino which is actually still fairly functional and fast. All the same... after running a dual 2.0GHz G5 Powermac, the little 500mhz Yikes really was still painful.
Anyway, come last Saturday I had purchased a replacement G5 finally... a 2006ish 2.0GHz Dual-Core purchased for a very respectable $150 on eBay from a fellow who was 45 minutes leisurely drive away, complete with a poxy 15" LCD display. These have been considered to be a far more reliable machine than the early dual-processor models, with the only real endemic issue being failure of power supplies... That being said, the relatively large analogue componentry in a PSU is far easier to repair on a component level than the microsoldered circuitry of a logic-board. The Dual-Core is also a significantly faster machine on paper than the early Dual-processor, using 533mhz RAM and having PCI-E, all of which I must admit is a bit of a bummer as I cannot use my old G5's RAM, wireless card (which isnt a major concern as luckily my router is 2m away and wired Gigabit ethernet is much faster that 802.11G), or even my Studio Display for that matter until I buy an expensive adaptor, as the graphics card in the later G5's ditched the proprietry ADC video port (which my Studio Display utilises) for an industry standard DVI port. So as such that poxy Compaq LCD I got thrown in free was quite handy...
The compatibility issues aside though, the Dual-Core feels like a much faster machine than the DP, with far more fluidity in it's rendering of graphics, quick load and access-times, and also would seem to run a fair bit cooler, with the fans rarely even breaking a sweat. As a result, it is also far quieter than the DP which would sound like it was about to take off when you loaded up the CPU's. My only real complaint is the lack of built-in Airport... not that it is particularly concerning, as it is useless without an Apple base-station, but nonetheless I feel as though Apple cheated their pro users a bit when they deleted inbuilt Airport from the later towers. Also, the lack of ADC is a blessing and a curse... It is the industry standard, this is true. However it's rather a pain in the ass when you don't happen to have a large DVI display and yet you have a sexy Studio Display that you cant use until you order a crappy adaptor for 70 bucks from Hong Kong. Ah well... first world problems really.
So, anyway... Now that I've ranted long-windedly about a lot of everything and nothing to bring you up to date with really bugger-all, I should also point out that for my next New World Mac build-project, I will be purchasing a new logic-board for the old Dual-Processor which is currently part dismantled, and reviving it as... Well... I really don't have a clue. I'll find a use for it, I am sure of it! This however will be a blog entry for another day. I also may attempt a reflow of the faulty board and possibly purchase yet another dead machine for cheap and see what I can make happen, but this is yet another blog entry for yet another time.
Cheers!
OMT
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