Should I buy a Dual G4 450 Mhz . . ?

here is a relevant link:
http://www.lowendmac.com/macdan/05/0117.html

I am not sure how much you will be spending, however. The machine you mention is still a fine machine, however, and architecture aside, has fine upgrade potential. Still, read the link and decide for yourself.

i used to own one of those before upgrading to a dual g5 2.0 ghz. it now serves as my mom's internet and e-mail machine.

it depends on what you want to do with it. the only time i ever complained about that machine being slow was rendering video (what do you expect). but everything else, photoshop, indesign, quark, illustrator, flash, dreamwaever, that was all fine. it's a great machine. i think i had 894 mb of ram or something like that. the only reason why i upgraded was because i work with more video files and such now.

I own a Power Mac G4 Dual 450, which I purchased in September 2000. It has 1.25 GB of RAM. Now I know that it's worth about $400. It also has a SCSI card and Zip Drive. I have been running Mac OS X since that January, performs very well. Not using Photoshop though.

i have a dual 450MHz g4 cube (frankencube style) and it still feels snappy.

Kirk said:

. . . or is it useless?

Got an offer on a Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) dual 450 Mhz 30 gig HD 384 Mb RAM and a 19 inch CRT. Will it be useable for Photoshop and basic design apps or will it be to slow? Might use it as a server as it has Gigabit ethernet.

I will of course have to add some more RAM.

Does anyone have a similer machine running OS X?

Click to expand...

I have had one for a while now. it started out stock, but over the years I have upgraded the video card to a Radeon 9000, have 1GB RAM, put in an ATTO UL4S SCSI card with 2 Seagate X15 18GB drives Striped in a RAID. Last month, I added a Siig USB2/ FW800 PCI card. I have some considerable $$ invested in this.
I don't do Photoshop type work but do a lot of database work. Virtual PC is pretty painful to use. I have a database with over 100,000 records (Ingram Mirco sales data) in it that has to be rebuilt regularly. Before the ATTO upgrade, it took over an hour to update the database, after it takes about 25minutes. So it depends on what you want to use it for. I am waiting to see how Tiger runs on it before I decide to either replace the CPU or buy a G5 tower. Most of the PCI cards can migrate to a new computer so my investment will endure. I wouldn't pay much for a stock unit (<$400) because you need to spend seroius money to upgrade it to something useful.

I'm actually using a single PM 450, upgraded video to Radeon 9000, added 120GB hard drive, 768MB RAM and I love it. It still feels snappier than the 2GHz Pentium's that we have at work, and I'm able to do Photoshop fairly well, although I don't usually use any serious filters. OS X runs fine, and my wife and I each have our own account and are pretty much always both logged in. Games run OK. Warcraft III runs great, The Sims tends to be a little slow, but still playable, and I also was able to play the UT 04 demo on it without a problem. I can only imagine that a dual 450 would be twice as fast.

As long as the deal's good, I'd say go for it. I have one of these machines (pretty loaded) as an audio workstation. It works pretty well, I've had few problems with it. But as it's been said - anything really intense is going to take some time. The stock graphics card is pretty bad for OS X and all the eye candy even with 1.25GB of RAM in it. But it'll run everything like any good 4 year old Mac should!

cpjakes

yup, it works

The 450 DP is definately photoshop capable, and with large files. No problem. Totally stable. Fast with almost everything you do. Filters excluded (I don't use anyway). I use it with 1.5 Gbs. Should get a very good price too given the release of Mini Mac.