G5 Hack: GA-Z68AP-D3 / Intel Core i5 2500K / 10.7.2

[roguedesigner]

G5 Hack: GA-Z68AP-D3 / Intel Core i5 2500K / 16GB Corsair Vengeance / PNY nVidia 9600GT 512MB / OS X 10.7.2

System Picture

Component List

Mac OS X version 10.7 Lion
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AMHWP8?ie=UTF8

GIGABYTE GA-Z68AP-D3 ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z68AP-D3-Intel-1155-Motherboard/dp/B005M2AQQY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322671125&sr=8-1

INTEL Core i5 2500K CPU
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-BOX80623I52500K-Core-i5-2500K-Processor/dp/B004EBUXHQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322671595&sr=1-1

CORSAIR Vengeance 1600MHz DDR3 Memory, 16GB Quad-channel kit
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Vengeance-Channel-240-Pin-CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9/dp/B004E0ZKLQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322671698&sr=1-1

OCZ 750W ZS Series PSU
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-80PLUS-Bronze-Performance-compatible/dp/B005A2RJOI/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322671780&sr=1-1

ZALMAN CNPS5X CPU cooler
http://www.amazon.co.uk/ZALMAN-CNPS-5X-Processor-cooler/dp/B004MSTZQQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1322851683&sr=8-2

Already Owned

Samsung SH-223 SATA DVD-RW drive
Discontinued

Apple G5 case, modified to take an ATX / mATX board
From a DOA G5 1.8 uniproc, basic unmodified cases can be found on eBay for around £70

SEAGATE Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM HDD
Discontinued

APPLE Airport Extreme A1260 (BCM94321)
Just had one lying around

miniPCIE to PCIE Adapter
http://www.amazon.com/MiniPCI-E-to-PCI-E-Wireless-Adapter/dp/B003MMY14Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322672423&sr=1-1

HEWLETT PACKARD HP 2009V 20" 16:9 Widescreen monitor
Discontinued

APPLE Wired keyboard
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Keyboard-Numeric-MB110LL-VERSION/dp/B005DLDTAE/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322672581&sr=1-2

APPLE Magic Mouse
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MB829LL-A-Magic-Mouse/dp/B002TLTGM6/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322672614&sr=1-1

TECHNIKA Bluetooth dongle
UK supermarket chain Tesco's own brand; cheap, easy to get hold of and works 100%

PNY nVidia 9600GT 512MB
Discontinued

AKASA Vortexx Neo VGA Cooler
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Akasa-Vortexx-Neo-AK-VC03-BLUV-cooler/dp/B001BZ69IK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322673171&sr=8-1

Zalman Fan Mate fan speed controller
http://www.amazon.com/Zalman-Fanmate-2-Speed-Controller-Retail/dp/B000292DO0/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322673264&sr=1-1

ANTEC TrueQuiet 120 120mm cooling fan
http://www.amazon.com/Antec-120mm-Cooling-Quiet-120/dp/B004AGXHE6/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322673360&sr=1-1

XIGMATEK XSF-F9251 92mm case fan
Discontinued


Comments

I needed to replace the Powermac G5 2.0 DP that I use when I work from home (two or three days a week) with something that could run newer software. The G5 is still very useable in terms of speed but having to export down to older formats was a pain, particularly with InDesign. I considered a new Mac mini, but by the time all the boxes have been ticked on the BTO form a mini isn't particularly good value. A used iMac within my price range didn't appeal to me; they're very nice machines but I was concerned that they wouldn't represent enough of an upgrade to justify the expense. Mac Pros within my price range were ruled out for the same reason.

About a year ago I put together an AMD 4050e based hack just as a science experiment. Whilst it was temperamental due to its hacked kernel, and installing retail was a pain, it did open me up to the idea of a hack. I came to regard hacks as being little different in principle to the Umax clone that sat on my desk in the 90s. One good thing that came out of my AMD experiment was that I had modified a G5 case to take PC components which I could reuse very easily.

Having made up my mind to build a hack, I drew up a wish list of what it should do. It needed to be built within a budget of around £300, it had to be quiet, it needed to run at least 10.6.8 with the possibility of upgrading to Lion and in terms of performance it had to be somewhere near a base model 4 core 2010 Pro.

Initially I was going to use a Core i3 2120 CPU, but decided on a Core i5 2500K. The i5 offered HD3000 graphics as a fall back, is a solid over clocker should I ever decide to go that route and will outperform the i3 by some margin.

The original spec called for 16GB of Kingston HyperX 1600MHz DDR3, simply out of brand loyalty to Kingston. When I went to pick up the parts, I was told it was on back order and so settled on a 16GB Corsair Vengeance quad channel kit instead. PCs aren't as fussy about memory as Macs can be, and Corsair is a reputable manufacturer so I was happy with the last minute change.

The PNY 9600GT isn't a performance card by current standards, but it's solid and is fully supported natively under OS X. The stock cooler is incredibly noisy though, so that was replaced with an Akasa Vortexx Neo fed through a Zalman Fan Mate. The Vortexx has an aggressive impeller type fan that is very efficient, and I have no problems with running it at a lower speed than Akasa intended. Hooked up to the Fan Mate, it is very quiet. The downside is that it lights up blue, and I have no desire to start taking it apart to disable the LED.

The cooling fans are exceptionally quiet and give plenty of flow through the cheese grater G5 case. As this system lives about a foot away from my ear, noise levels are very important. I'm used to the sound of real Macs, and although they're not silent the noise they do make has a very unobtrusive quality. That was the aim for this build, and in that respect it has turned out well.

The OCZ PSU was a last minute add on as I was getting paranoid about the 500W Akasa that I already had. The Akasa is about 3 years old and in real terms probably only delivers about 450W, and I didn't want random weirdness due to the PSU struggling. The OCZ is virtually silent and seems a very solid piece of equipment.

Using UniBeast I gave it a clean install of Lion. The install process was painless and very Mac-like. Thanks to Tony and Macman for this, coffee inbound. I just followed the instructions to the letter and everything just worked. Insanely great. Once Lion had installed, I booted from UniBeast again and ran MultiBeast. I imported the DSDT file that I downloaded from the database, enabled the sound, installed Lnx2Mac's RTL81xx driver and grabbed the Mac Pro 3,1 system identifier. The SATA was set to 3rd party in Multibeast, then the UniBeast USB was ejected and the machine was shut down.

The rest of the memory was installed (I had only dropped 4GB in there for the Lion install), the bluetooth dongle plugged in, the wired Mighty Mouse I had used for the install unplugged and I switched on my Magic Mouse. A quick cup of tea and then I fired it up. It booted up perfectly, and connected to the Magic Mouse without even asking. App Store, iCloud and Face Time are working perfectly. Everything, in fact, just worked. Apart from sleep. It will sleep but loses its USB on wake. I'm looking into it. I enabled Airdrop with a terminal hack:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1

Relaunched Finder and the job was a good 'un. This hack isn't unique to OSX86; my 2009 Pro that I use for work also had to be enabled in the same way.

I haven't run GeekBench yet, but it feels snappier than my Pro when launching and using apps. Photoshop in particular starts almost instantly and runs very smoothly. When I get around to running GeekBench, I will be happy with something on a par with Pro, which posts a score of the mid-9000s in 32 mode. All in all I'm very happy with this build. Thanks to everybody who makes this place such a useful source of information.

Edit History
02 / 12 / 2011
Replaced the stock Intel cooler with a Zalman CNPS5X. After spending a couple of days with this machine I began to hear an irritating whistling noise from the stock fan which got quite distracting. The Zalman isn't perfectly silent at all times but the quality of the sound it makes isn't distracting. Not a cooler for serious over clockers but on a moderate over clock of 3.9GHz it stays quiet and the CPU temp is steady at around 32?C.

The main reason I went for the Zalman is that it sits inside the footprint of the stock cooler. Larger coolers can be a problem with high profile memory as they can block the slot nearest the CPU. The Zalman would be hard to beat in this respect.

 

[jpa]

nice nice hack

 

[jester969]

Your desktop is dope!


What kind of wallpaper is that?

 

[roguedesigner]

Yeah that wallpaper is nasty isn't it. It was there when we bought the house

Ran Geekbench in 32 bit mode:

The 9600GT is the bottleneck in the system i know, I do have a line on a used HD5770 for a reasonable price and may jump on that but to be honest the 9600 is adequate for my needs. Geekbench is on a par with the base 2009 Pro. This was built to do real world things though, and I ran some very quick tests of my own on common tasks.

Photoshop CS5

1. Open 1.5GB psd document - 6.5 seconds

• Horizontal transform 1.5GB 240cm x 90cm psd - 6 seconds[/list:24vj8tnq]
  • 5px Gaussian blur on same psd - 4.5 seconds[/list:24vj8tnq]
    
    Illustrator CS5
    1. Open 850MB ai document - 4.8 seconds
    • Scale 850MB ai document 175% - 6 seconds[/list:24vj8tnq]
      • Export same ai as photoshop psd, preserving layers - 9 seconds[/list:24vj8tnq]
        
        Handbrake
        1. Convert 400MB xvid movie to iPhone m4v - 2 minutes 40 seconds
        
        Photoshop and Illustrator are a little faster than the Pro, Handbrake is around 30 seconds slower. Those Xeons still pack a punch. These are pretty good results, certainly good enough for what I need it to do.

 

[jackowild]

Did you get sleep to work? I've bought this motherboard today and am now installing lion

 

[roguedesigner]

Did you get sleep to work? I've bought this motherboard today and am now installing lion

Nope, I don't think anybody on a Z68 based board has got it to work yet
The Z68AP is a good choice of board though, it runs well and is good value without being obviously bargain basement.

Edited the original post because I swapped out the stock cooler for a Zalman CNPS5X. The Zalman is quieter, but it isn't a cooler for serious overclocking. Still a good replacement for stock and if you have high profile memory it's a great choice as it doesn't block the slots nearest the CPU. Gave it a moderate overclock to 3.9GHz.

 

[Stork]

Sleep will work when you install Snow Leopard and/or Lion and use MultiBeast with your mobo's DSDT from the tonymacx86 DSDT Database (see Resources menu top, right on this page). Read the MultiBeast Features document, especially the Defaults for UserDSDT on page 3.

Additionally, you can use my MultiBeast configuration in my user build description unless your have a graphics card that requires different kexts. But, first, research what other forum members have done with your mobo and graphics card.

 

[roguedesigner]

Thanks for the pointer Stork. My multi beast install used the same settings as yours, except for choosing the Mac mini system definition. Mine was Mac Pro 3,1. In the interests of science I ran it again and chose the mini system definition and still no go. It will sleep, it will wake, but I have to replug the keyboard and BT module. If a USB drive is connected I get the "Disk was not put away..." dialogue. After 30 seconds or so the USB disk will spin up and connect. To be fair, I'm so used to just shutting Macs down now with the four finger salute that it's not something I'm in a desperate hurry for - I've had enough sleep issues on real Macs, especially when a non-NEC chipset USB card has been installed, to not be all that bothered by the lack of it. With the price of electricity these days, maybe no sleep isn't a bad thing.

 

[Stork]

LOL! I remember those early Mac days, making sure the USB chipset was NEC. Still have a Hot Rodded Sawtooth with a USB 2 card.

I'm now using a Logitech Unifying Solar K750 Mac keyboard and an Apple Magic Mouse. The Logitech Unifying and Targus BT receivers are plug into an IOGear KVM switch. I can wake up Zorro with a MM or KB click. I am living right!

I only use sleep during the day when I'm away from my desk. I, too, shut down the computer at the end of each day. However, I use sleep/wake-up on my HacHTPC. The HacHTPC wakes up at Midnight, if it asleep, downloads files, checks folders for any appropriate actions and refreshes the Plex server files. It then executes a scheduled sleep at 0700 in the morning. So, it's nice to have sleep/wake-up working correctly and on it's own, too.

 

[roguedesigner]

LOL! I remember those early Mac days, making sure the USB chipset was NEC. Still have a Hot Rodded Sawtooth with a USB 2 card.

I once bent over backwards to find ten very expensive NEC based USB cards for the G5s at the place I was working at the time. Nobody told me the G5 needed 3.3V cards