Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks PC PCI-E video card for Powermac G5 late 2005

Hi, I'm Nick, and I'm new to "real" macs. glad to be part of the club. I just got a G5 tower from my cousin for 30 bucks. not a bad deal if you ask me. outdated, sure. but in the tasks i do, it blows away my 600 dollar (after upgrades) AMD hackintosh (installed from retail, BTW. im no pirate. if you're wondering.)

However, the video card in this thing is a joke. a geforce 6600LE? come on, really? I came across a thread on mac rumors about someone who supposedly had a flashed 9600GT in his 2.7GHz quad G5 tower, but he seems to be inactive on the forum, so I cannot ask him where he got it or how he did it. anyone here have any idea?

thats one thought. the other thought, is i have 2 video cards laying around. both work fine. one is a eVGA Geforce 7900GS 256MB pci-e. the other is a radeon HD3650. any chance of getting either of those going?

specs are: 2GHz PowerPC G5 Dual-Core
Late 2005 model
air cooled (thank god)
PCI-E Geforce 6600LE
160GB Sata hard drive. (wish i could use SSD in this)

Video cards require their firmware to be written for the OS and hardware they are used with, so you need to get a card that's specific to your computer. It's somewhat common for vendors to make one card and two firmwares for it, and sell them under slightly different model names. Often these different models have very different prices, and I've seen several examples of people buying a card for windows, flashing it to mac, and saving themselves some money because the windows card cost less than the mac card.

If you want to do this you will need to find information on how to do it with the specific card you have in mind. There's probably a few places online that discuss this specific task, but I don't know where you'd find them. Not every card comes in both mac and windows flavors, and not every card that does can be reflashed to the other platform. (usually requires installing the card into a windows computer, obtaining a firmware updater for windows, downloading the mac firmware file, hacking the updater to accept the mac firmware, and flashing it - sometimes it's not necessary to hack the installer) It's about on par with jailbreaking an iphone.

Welcome to FTM, Nick!

I can't answer your question myself, but I can suggest that you phone Other World Computing. In my experience, their staff is very knowledgeable and helpful.

true that... i know how to flash, its not new to me, I just need to know if the 9600 can truly be flashed to open firmware. i know some EFI tricks.... use stock video card and add a compatible PC video card, use a video injector kext, and it will work in the OS, etc..
but i know hackintosh injectors will do nothing for this powerPC.


and thanks for the welcome, Jon. I will most definitely call OWC tomorrow. Thanks!

Hey man i know its been a long time but did anything end up working for you i want to get a G5 and upgrade the card massively!!

Hi,

The most powerful PCIe card you can put in a G5 late 2005 is the NVIDIa FX Quardo FX4500. You can get a PC version and flash it to work in the Mac.

The next best is the 7800GT, again flashed for Mac.

How-tos and ROMs - start here:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvflash-basics.

You will need a PC which will boot from a Floppy disk to flash the video card using NvFlash.

I use NvFlash 5.06 downloaded from Guru3D.com and an old Dell Vostro 200.

If you have problems, I can dropbox you everything you need.

Incidentally, I have an SSD booting my Quad G5 via a FirmTek SeriTek 2SE2 PCIe card - the only bootable PCIe card for the late 2005 G5. It has 2 external eSATA ports, but I have cabled them to an internal Sonnet Jive mount for the SSD. This is more than twice as fast as the built in SATA connections.

Regards,

Nick