Oh yes, it shall be mine...

[Power666]

I've found a source of quad G5 systems. I'll have one by the end of next week. Now to plot the acquisition of upgrades. More RAM is a given and a new video card (comes with a Geforce 6600GT).'

Though I think the first thing I'll get isn't a hardware upgrade but IBM's XLC compiler for OS X if I can find a place selling it.

[neowolf]

The most beautiful PPC machine you can get right now. Gorgeous~

[Power666]

Yes, I've been wanting a new system for that 18 months and I'm not going to settle for anything less than the best of the best. There is no greater PowerPC based Mac out there. I gotta find XLC though.

I think I'm going to be getting this RAM for it shortly. I'll likely only need one kit to bring but I could probably talk the GF into letting me get two fo those kits for a total of 8.5 GB of RAM.

[Power666]

It has arrived. The stock 512 MB of RAM just isn't enough for anything so next week upgrades will be ordered. I'd love to get to 8.5 GB of RAM and add a Radeon X1900XT or a Geforce 7800GTX.

[Kohi]

Holy hell man, are you making a Transformer?

[Power666]

Nope.

There is a bit of development stuff I want to tinker with. I'd love to get into the whole general purpose GPU stuff and that requires a hefty video card to be worth while. The other thing I want to do is create a software tool to overclock the damn thing.

I've already put the system under some stress. It isn't hard for me to hit a sustained ~220% percent CPU load at all (400% is max due to quad CPU's). I should look into why it isn't hitting 400% with that application as it should be able to.

Right now I'm in the midst of fine tuning the machine on the software side of things. I've already gutted out a few kernel extension I know I'll never use. Oddly enough, they're installed on machines that simply can't use the hardware they're related. Similarly, I've axed a few start up items that are useless to me but Apple configures them to run by default. No real performance difference thus far (and I wasn't expecting any).

[Power666]

Well I picked up a Radeon X1900XT locally. The only problem I had was dropping a screw into the case and getting it back out. As great of a case as it is, it is surprisingly difficult to remove a dropped screw without taking the whole thing apart.

I'd have the RAM I want on order but it is out of stock yet again.

[chedabob]

Heh, I wanted a G5 case a while back, for my PC. Replacement cases are either hard to come by, or really expensive.

[Power666]

Well I orderd 4 GB of RAM today.

You have to really know what you're doing to mount a full PC set up into a G5 case. You're limited to mini-ATX due to four expansion slots on the back. Finding a spot for the powersully can also be challenging. Though once put together with proper cooling, it is impressive. I believe the Mac Pro cases lend themselves better to PC moding than the G5 cases do.