If you followed January's PPC Challenge, you would have seen me acquire multiple PPC machines, including:
-$5 G5 Dual 1.8GHz non booting (it had a V2 and V1 CPU mismatch, no GPU), Free Geek Minneapolis
-$10 G5 Dual 2.5GHz non booting (dead PSU, leaking LCS), Free Geek Minneapolis
-$10 G5 Quad 2.5GHz non booting (powers on then dies, LCS intact), Free Geek Minneapolis


Additional parts purchased:
-$25 extra G5 PSU, eBay
-$16 extra 1.8GHz CPU (ended up being a V3), eBay
-$7 power cord for quad G5 (special plug), eBay
-$35 extra 1.8GHz CPU (V2 to match one of the other randos), eBay
-$13 G5 dual CPU (1/2 of a quad), eBay

I disassembled the 2.5 dual LCS and soaked and cleaned the CPUs. I then put them on air coolers and got some mixed results. Even tried the 2.5 in the 1.8 motherboard. After too much messing around I gave up and called it a loss.

Received my 1.8v2 a couple days ago, and finally have a matching pair of 1.8, so put them into the 1.8 motherboard (assumed it has the solder flex issue, but further testing is still needed), and I got it to boot up.


Feeling lucky, I tried the 2.5 air cooled back in the 2.5 motherboard, and it actually fired up this time.


Restarted with the ASD cd to attempt the thermal calibration due to no LCS installed.


CPUs looked good, to ran the thermal calibration, but got some fan errors.


Ran it a couple more times and suddenly I was greeted with a horrendous sound.... oops, the fan I broke and mended gave way to failure!


So there may be some life after death for two of these dual G5 machines. I am in the process of rebuilding the LCS for the quad, to see if I can get some life out of that one as well. I am pretty sure one of the CPU cards is faulty, so eBay'd a spare for $13.

Xbench comparisons on CPU tests only on 10.5.8 for the dual 2.5 and dual 1.8.

I pulled the rear fan from the dual 1.8 and put it on the air cooled dual 2.5. Ran the ASD for everything but the CPU, that passed.

Then ran the CPU tests, passed.

Then ran the thermal calibration... did not finish after an hour, assumed it was frozen... restarted and the fans were quieter... so it must have done something. Booted into 10.4.11 and ran CineBench 11


Both CPUs working. Booted into 10.5.8 and ran CB11 again as well as Xbench


I shall dub thee Lazarus Dual2.5