Skip to content

Convert your G5 to Intel power!

I use iChat a lot--it's one of the ways the far-flung Macworld editorial staff keeps in touch with each other, for instance. My iChat info also winds up in a lot of iChat screenshots--some I take, and some taken by others. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. But sometimes, the user taking the photo might have my actual iChat ID visible on the screen, or I'll mess up and have it visible in the header of my buddy list. As a result, my iChat ID isn't a great secret--and since I have a .Mac account, it's actually very easy to figure out.

I used to leave my iChat sessions open, and would chat with whomever stopped by, as I love talking to other Mac users. But as the site's popularity grew, these random chats began to take up more and more of the day, so I eventually had to lock iChat down to only allow chats those on my buddy list (iChat Preferences -> Accounts -> Security tab). Now if someone wants to chat with me, they have to send me an email first. Not nearly as friendly as before, but at least I have time to work again :).

In any event, when I set up my recently-purchased MacBook, I forgot to set up the chat restriction. I didn't notice at first as I didn't have any third-party chat requests come in for the first couple days. Then I started getting chat requests from unknown users. Before disabling unknown chats again, I thought I'd take a few minutes and chat with at least a couple of the requesters, just to see who they were, etc. One of them turned out to be a high school student (or a friend pulling my leg; I'm still not sure which) who seemed to be the ultimate Mac power user--he claimed to own something like six Macs, including a PowerMac G5, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. Although that sounded suspicious to me ($10K worth of Macs while in high school!?), I kept talking with him. That is, until this exchange took place (my lone entry is in green, somewhat obviously):

chat log

So it seems all the industry experts have been wrong for all these years--apparently the PowerPC G5 and the Intel Core Duo CPUs are pin-compatible; just yank the G5, drop in a Core Duo, and your G5 is now a Boot Camp-capable Intel-powered Mac. Hmmm...why haven't I read more about this on the net?! :)

I chose that point to exit the conversation, and then immediately blocked future chat requests from non-buddies. So if this was a friend pulling my leg, you got me. If it wasn't, then this is clearly the most out-there liar I've ever had the "pleasure" of chatting with.

Tags:

6 thoughts on “Convert your G5 to Intel power!”

  1. Totally true. In fact, I put in one Intel chip and one PowerPC in my dual-processor G5, and now I can run both apps native, at the same time.

    Oh. And if you're interested, I have a bridge to sell you.

  2. uh, hate to say this, but it sounds like you were chatting with my brother....

    I love him, but he couldn't tell the truth (or even a believable lie) to save his life!!!

  3. LOL!!! Just as classic as the assclown who used to be an Xlr8yourmac.com forum poster—I don’t recall the screen name he used… anyhow, around the time that the Digital Audio G4 Powermacs came out he had claimed to have two 733MHz G4s running in his Powermac 7600 (I think he claimed it was a 7600, could have been a 9500 or 9600, I don’t recall). Anyhow, he kept on insisting, so Mike Breeden (owner of Xlr8yourmac.com) replied with a post encouraging the kid to email him photos of the “modification” he had performed. Mike kept stating he hadn’t received anything, and of course the kid kept stalling. Eventually Mike canned (banned?) his lying butt from the forums.

    -he who stacks pork

  4. The only intel powermac g5 I have ever seen was a full rebild turning it into a hackingtosh so realy its not a g5 any more and they had to butcher the back of the tower to fit the intel bord and atx power ac.
    Fort bout doing it myself but just can't bring myself to cut up a g5 case they just look so cool and modern to me still I'm happy with my basic 1.6 ghz single cpu g5 that only cost me £90 off ebay uk. It may be old and slow but to me it beets any windows pc for reliabillaty hands down.......

  5. Back in the day it was commonplace for Intel 8086 and upwards chips to be mounted on "Daughterboards" and put in ageing pcs to improve their performance. There would seem to be no reason why the same could not be done with ageing Powermacs. True the OS would have to be "tweaked" to adapt to the odd environment but no more than for a Hackintosh I would have thought. Comments Please?

Comments are closed.