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History lesson required, Considering G4 PPC and know little or nothing about them...

C

Captain Pyro

macrumors member
Original poster
hello,

I'm currently running a c2d imac on 10.4.11 having switched from windows over a year ago.

The imac is shared with my wife, so i can't necessarily always get at it.

I'm starting up a small photographic business, part time initially, and want to do it on a shoestring rather than borrowing a wad and never seeing the end of it.

camera gear etc is all covered already, and i'm a photoshop veteran. i really don't know why i persisted with pc's so long. :apple: 🙂

i need a capable machine and cheap. huge hard drives aren't too important to me as i'll be burning off on a regular basis. firewire 400 at least and full speed usb2.0 are crucial... i be;ieve some macs od this era come with usb 1.1 disguised as 2.0? Ethernet- at least 100baseT, 1000 would be nice for future but i think that's reaching on a machine of this age. 🙄

some flavour of 10.4 is a must. i suppose 10.5 could happen, but i have yet to be persuaded it's a 'must have' upgrade.

memory is easily sorted. Just ask mr crucial. 😀

not sure about the processors... i know those old RISC PPc's are surprisingly quick for their clock speeds. Is an 800-odd mhz going to seem really slow? in photoshop CS2/Lightroom/NX2? NX2's a hog anyway and tbh, after playing with it on trial vs CS3, i think it's main target is people who would consider Elements on an 8 way PowerMac. I seem to have missed something. Am I correct in thinking that a UB like CS3 is non-PPC?

what do they use for graphics cards? how easy are they to upgrade? can i jsut whack any agp card in or am i limited? as far as disply is concerned, am i right in thinking that it's only if you have an ADC connector that you absoloutely HAVE to have an apply screen, ie, a DVI is a DVI is a DVI, ditto 15pin dsub VGA?

Basically, it's the last two para's that concern me most; all the other info i can find quite easily, but as soon as you start asking about what the processors feel like or what graphics cards work people jsut seem to clam up....
 
...obviously, as cash became available i'd consider upgrading... just realised how mean i sound... 🙂
 
A G4 PPC Mac is probably going to feel fairly painful for CS2 or CS3, except perhaps for a dual processor PowerMac G4. A G5 would probably be a better choice, but honestly, a used iMac C2D and a used PMG5 are probably going to run close together, and you're probably better at this point in the game sticking with the Intel computers. OS wise, they're fine -- 10.4 will run reasonably well on a G4 with a gig or more of RAM.

Anything called "Universal Binary" is by definition capable of running on both G4/G5 PPC Macs and Intel Macs. That's what the "universal" part of UB means. So UBs can run on PPC Macs as long as they satisfy the requirements.

Video-cards wise: there are ADC/DVI adapters (see...), but essentially, yes, you're right. You should probably stay away from most anything old enough to have an ADC port. As far as video cards, generally PPC Macs require "Mac" versions of video cards -- they're physically the same as PC versions, but they have different firmware. Most of the time, a PC card can be re-flashed to a "Mac" card, though. However, you do have to be careful, because AFAIK, the video standards changed two or three times during the PMG5 era (e.g. from PCI-x to PCI Express).
 
My wife uses a dual G5 (1.8 GHz) system, recently upgraded to 2GB RAM, for graphic design using Adobe CS3. It still works well -- the RAM upgrade from 512 MB to 2 GB was critical. But when I hop on for misc use, I feel the difference from my intel MBP. General OS use is slower. And she's been commenting that next year might be upgrade time.

Based on that, I'd not consider buying anything below a G5 system with a minimum of 2 GB RAM for professional use with Adobe CS2 or CS3.

If you're seriously thinking of going with a G4, I think it it's a must to demo it in a real life scenario -- spend a couple of hours doing your photo editing to see if it feels snappy enough.

Many disagree, but to be simplistic: a G4 system is roughly equivalent to a Pentium III system. Unless cash is very tight, I'd recommend buying such an old system for professional use.
 
I think DaveF gives good advice, here. If this is a day-to-day work machine, I would strongly encourage an Intel machine; if that is not possible, then a G5.
 
The dual processor G5 are by no means slow, and more than quick enough to run Photoshop CS3 (given enough RAM)...but i have no personal expreince of running photoshop CS3 on PPC G4s.
 
if it was an everyday machine i'd be considering an intel for sure i think.

basically the purpose i'm considering would be highly intermittent use as i'll be starting up as an evening/weekend type business alongside proper job.

i've got all my own camera gear already as i'm an ex-pro, so basically i'm looking to limit my exposure in case it all just doesn't work out, hence very cheap machine.

if it all works out i'll slowly upgrade and cut back on day job...
 
i was starting to consider something like a dual 1.25 G4 with as much ram as i could stuff it with...

so basically, it needs to be up to the job when the work's there and most of the time it'll be turned off... 🙂
 
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