Are people still looking for these?

Not sure what interest there is in this, if it's just the hard drive people want cloned or what.

 

Does it still boot into the Xenon OS?

 

Pretty sure it does. It's been in storage for a long time, so I'd have to find cables to confirm.

 

id love to see a boot video of it running

 

can you open it and show us the insides and the video card?
its very simple to open

 

The communities biggest interest would definitely be a clone of that drive, as currently Xenon OS is still oddly private. Would be a huge help to get more info and accessibility out there to people recreating their own alpha kits.

 

I remember reading about this...so cool :'D

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/power-mac-g5-alpha-xenon-kit.1833169/

User shinda here talks about an ISO from 2001...

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33201


And here are all SDKs, Xenon and Natal as installers :

https://mega.nz/#F!voIzCAjQ!FoAE6zLRzo2QAoBCDP5dPg

 

thoes recoveries are not nearly early enough

 

Ooohhhh...okay, sorry :S

 

i think the latest a alpha can use is 1600 somewhere close to that idk the exact numbers
but you need more then just a recovery to get them to boot they certainly are a interesting beast

 

Oh, that's really cool that this could help people researching this hardware. I didn't realize there was so little documentation on this.

I'm hesitant to install anything new on it, but I'm happy to try photographing some of the guts and seeing what I can do about powering it on for you all. It's kind of buried behind stuff at the moment (that's a photo I took a few months ago), but I'll try to get what you're asking for.

 

Normal power cord, USB mouse & keyboard and a DVI to VGA adapter is all that's needed.
Before powering it on please open the side panel and confirm there is no white residue on the bottom of the case, if there is do not power it up.

 

???

 

This is some cool stuff dude
Thanks for sharing
Not too much info regarding this beast

 

What kind of video card syclopse

 

The cooling system in these towers fail and leak. Video cards are spec'd out in other threads here on AG but the search system lacks.

Edit: ATI X800XT 256MB was one of the 2 cards used.

 

that's right the early g5 heatsink's were water cooled I keep thinking that they were made by Delphi you can covert them to air cooled
if anyone needs them I have the apple G5 service manuals

 

The PowerMac G5 model used by Microsoft for the Alpha G5 kit was not liquid cooled.

Only the 2.5 and 2.7 GHz DP models had it and were prone to failure (the later PowerPC 970MP Quad Core model had a better liquid cooling system).

 

At least back then Apple used to stand behind their products. I had one of those machines with the leaky liquid cooling system that was stuck in the dark at the back of my desk and I never realized it until I turned it on one day and the power supply went bang.

So I took it into Apple to get a repair quote (since it was well out of warranty and I didn't have Applecare) and they called me up about a week later and told me I could come and pick it up - they had done a free-of-charge swap with a new system and just transferred the HDDs and RAM (both of which were undamaged) from the old one.

I'm sure if the same thing happened today they would find some way to weasel out of fixing it.

 

Even the Apple of then probably wasn't supposed to do that, I'm guessing you got lucky with your local store.

@Kao Anyway, back to the G5 kit: yes people are still interested! As others have said, it's best to take the side off and inspect the system for residue before powering it up. Maybe show us some photos too if you can.