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rhogue islander · 08:14 AM

I am considering purchasing a 1.8 or dual 2 ghz G5 and am wondering if my usb and ata133 cards will be compatable, given that they are 33 mhz pci cards

Can anyone shed any light on this through experience?

tia

-rhogue

awcopus · Sep 17, 2003, 08:32 AM

They are incompatible with PCI-X. There may be an adapter available at some point that would enable you to use this card in a PCI-X slot....but it wouldn't really be worth doing. You can't fit more than two drives in the G5 anyway, and there are actually plenty of USB ports on a G5. If there aren't enough for your peripherals, consider a powered USB hub that works with USB 2.0 and the legacy version.

If you have a lot of internal EIDE HDs that you want to continue to be able to use, and price is no object...

http://www.macraid.com/eide.htm

And of course there's Apple's beautiful but "priced for corporate sales" RAID which will work with your EIDE drives.

Finally, a more affordable option is to repurpose these drives using compatible Firewire enclosures from companies like Granite Digital, Firewire Direct, OWC. If it's a high performance drive, consider a Firewire 800 enclosure.

awcopus · Sep 17, 2003, 08:33 AM

double post. sorry.

AngryAngel · Sep 17, 2003, 09:44 AM

Originally posted by awcopus:
They are incompatible with PCI-X.

This doesn't mean they won't work in the G5's slots, which are backwards compatible with 64-bit 33Mhz cards. They won't work with cards that only support 66MHz (but will work with 66MHz cards that support 33MHz).

More of a problem is whether the USB card is compatible with OS X.

The ATA card should be fine if it recommended for use with other Macs.

This assumes these cards are (like the majority of PCI cards made in the last several years) will work on 3.3V signalling. Most card are mixed-voltage, with the exception of some pro-audio cards that are fixed at 5V.

See:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/cip/pdf/g5/073-0808.pdf

kevin_stevens · Sep 17, 2003, 02:42 PM

>This doesn't mean they won't work in the G5's slots, which are >backwards compatible with 64-bit 33Mhz cards. They won't work with >cards that only support 66MHz (but will work with 66MHz cards that >support 33MHz).
>
>This assumes these cards are (like the majority of PCI cards made in >the last several years) will work on 3.3V signalling. Most card are >mixed-voltage, with the exception of some pro-audio cards that are >fixed at 5V.

Umm, that's not what the document you referenced says. For the PCI-X slots (which are the ones the OP asked about), they only support 64-bit 100MHz or 133MHz.

In other words, the references to PCI are ONLY for the 1.6, the references to PCI-X are ONLY for the 1.8/2.0. The PCI-X slots are not PCI compatible. I agree that the documentation is written a bit fuzzily.

KeS

ChrisF · Sep 17, 2003, 03:08 PM

Originally posted by kevin_stevens:
Umm, that's not what the document you referenced says. For the PCI-X slots (which are the ones the OP asked about), they only support 64-bit 100MHz or 133MHz.

You're mistaken on this point. A quote from Apple: "PCI-X supports 3.3V signaling and Universal 33MHz and 66MHz PCI cards."

Chris

kevin_stevens · Sep 17, 2003, 04:13 PM

Well, the very next sentence but one is contradictory:

"PCI-X supports 3.3V signaling and Universal 33MHz and 66MHz PCI cards. Your built-to-order Power Mac G5 system can be configured with PCI or PCI-X expansion technology. Three 64-bit PCI-X slots let you add one card running at 133MHz and two cards running at 100MHz. Three 32-bit PCI slots allow you to add three 33MHz cards."

KeS

sibellc · Sep 17, 2003, 09:12 PM

Admittedly the language is somewhat unclear, but it's not exactly contradictory. It "says" that PCI-X will support Universal 33MHz and 66MHz PCI cards at 3.3 volts as well as one PCI-X card running at 133MHz and two cards running at 100MHz. While it could be worded better, the third sentence isn't exclusive, i.e. it doesn't say Three 64-bit PCI-X slots only let you add...

Besides, deductively: If PCI-X were not backwards compatible, the resulting uproar would completely obfuscate that which followed the announcement that OSX would only support computers that originally shipped with a G3 processor (yes, I know, except the first PowerBook G3), thus crushing numerous dreams of watching the IIGS preemptively multitask printing PDFs in full Quartz glory on an ImageWriter II while the user honed his Logo coding skill and prompting cries of "but system 6.0.5 got ported! I bought the hard drive upgrade! I'm not asking to boot it off a 5.25" floppy! I will not be forced to upgrade! Never! Give me Liberty or..." (Don't flame me, it's hyperbole. I know there were scores of perfectly legitimate complaints about the G3 supporting the Beige G3's with the minor caveat of "but not the graphics chip", but plenty of people ludicrously screamed that it would neither support NUBUS based boards nor address 32-bit SIMMs.)

but I digress...

My point is that if two of the three G5's didn't support regular PCI, Apple might as well announce that Panther will only render video at 48 bits and that we'll all really appreciate 281.5 trillion colors once monitors and video cards are released that can actually display them. That really would be one hell of an "Oh, and one more thing..." And then follow Michael Dell's sage advice.

Well, after I typed this all out, I hit command-a to do a spell check and then leaned on the 0 key while reaching for the mouse, soo discovering, much to my chagrin, that Safari doesn't support Undo. I don't think IE does either, but still...

CBS

Originally posted by kevin_stevens:
Well, the very next sentence but one is contradictory:

"PCI-X supports 3.3V signaling and Universal 33MHz and 66MHz PCI cards. Your built-to-order Power Mac G5 system can be configured with PCI or PCI-X expansion technology. Three 64-bit PCI-X slots let you add one card running at 133MHz and two cards running at 100MHz. Three 32-bit PCI slots allow you to add three 33MHz cards."

KeS