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Brain Surgery Pt.5
By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Power Mac G5 Just like the first four parts of this never ending brain surgery series, this is about another memory upgrade.
  1. G5's memory upgrade
  2. iBook 1.2GHz memory upgrade
  3. 1.67 GHz 15" PowerBook 1GB DDR-2 memory upgrade
  4. 2nd Harddrive for the G5 • Seagate Barracuda 250 GB SATA drive
However, this was most likely the final voluntary "brain surgery" performed on the good old Power Mac G5 that I had bought in November 2003. It's a M9031LL/A, a 1.8GHz single Processor Mac with a 900MHz bus and 4 memory banks (each with 2 slots), which take PC3200 DDR SDRAM DIMM memory. The G5 came originally with 512 MByte RAM and was upgraded with 2 additional 512 MB Ram modules to 1.5 GB in February 2005.
Power Mac G5

Only after using Activity Monitor for a while, to monitor the memory usage and pageouts, I started looking at SDRAM prices again and while you can find cheaper memory almost everywhere, I ended up at my trusted source: http://www.crucial.com/

The Crucial Mac Memory Advisor Tool however, seems to be optimized not for your system but their profit. Anyway, I ordered the same memory, I had put into the G5 before, which used to be on their recommended list way back when, but not this time around.

CT6464Z40B :DDR PC3200 • CL=3 • UNBUFFERED • NON-ECC • DDR400 • 2.6V • 64Meg x 64

Inserting the memory into the free slots on the G5's motherboard is really easy. The case opens and the huge exhaust fan is removed without having to touch a screwdriver. The memory modules are getting added in pairs from the center out and the whole process took only a couple minutes. But, Tom and I closed the G5's case only after blowing a whole can of air through the heat sink and the boards, cleaning things up a little.


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Published on: Thursday, March 15th, 2007  •  Category: [hardware]
Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/hardware/brainsurgery5.html