Trouble Shooting to get a Tower working

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Hello Everyone!

Recently, I picked up a PowerMac G5 tower for an incredibly insane cheap price ($10), from an owner that wanted to off-load the one that he had. Now, from what he told me was that he started to experience I/O errors and didn't have time to fix the problems, so he decided to dump it instead of repairing it. It has been my experience with PCs, that if you start having problems like this, you usually have something going bad that needs to be replaced. So, I am trying to find out what, specifically, was failing and what I need to do, in order to get this tower up and running again.

First the specifics:

M9032LL/A (early 2003)
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
L2 Cache 512K per processor
Frontside bus 1GHz per processor

DDR SDRAM main memory 256MB PC2700 (333MHz)
4GB maximum 512MB PC3200 (400MHz)
8GB maximum 512MB PC3200 (400MHz)
8GB maximum (it had 1gb memory installed already)

ATI RADEON 9800 Pro with 128MB DDR SDRAM
Hard drive: (none installed)
Optical drive: SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)

Three open full-length PCI-X slots: one 133MHz, 64-bit slot and two 100MHz, 64-bit slots

No hard drives to work with, mind you, so I had to start without one available. Hooked everything up, pushed the power button and -nothing-..... went inside, pushed the little black button -nothing-..... replaced the battery, pushed the power button and now I have fans running at full tilt, but nothing showing up on my screen.

Might be the power supply, might be the motherboard, might be a lot of things that I'm not aware of.

Question(s) would be: what do I need to check next or further, or would this be an entirely too expensive project to continue with? My reasoning behind getting this system, in the first place, is that I enjoy creating graphics, animation, and 3D and have found that Macs are usually the best thing to use for this particular hobby of mine.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks Everyone,,,,

Comynn ;D
 
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You hear the fans spinning up, so I think it's safe to say that the power supply is working. If you are getting absolutely nothing on screen, then it's either the motherboard or the graphics card. Do you get a startup chime? If not, then it's likely the motherboard that's gone bad.
 
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Thanks for the quick response lifeisabeach.... when I get back from work, this evening, I try to boot it up and see what does or does not happen. Should it *not* chime and it does, in fact, wind up being the motherboard, would it be better to replace it or turn this tower into a rather heavy doorstop?

Thanks again..

Comynn
 
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Thanks for the quick response lifeisabeach.... when I get back from work, this evening, I try to boot it up and see what does or does not happen. Should it *not* chime and it does, in fact, wind up being the motherboard, would it be better to replace it or turn this tower into a rather heavy doorstop?

Thanks again..

It partly depends on how much a motherboard will run (assuming it is the motherboard and JUST the motherboard), but also consider that you can only run OS 10.5, which is quite outdated today. You'd be relegated to running outdated software and locked out of running Windows as an option. None of this is absolutely bad, it just all depends on your wants and needs. Many people happily run older versions of their OS and software... they continue to work as well as they did when they were new and cutting edge for their time.
 

pigoo3

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These things are selling for about $100 on e-Bay...Craig's List as well...100% working. Since you paid $10 for it...spending any more than $90 would be over-doing it.

- Nick
 

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