Picked up a G5, and I know NOTHING about Macs :) Help!

G51989 · Feb 25, 2012

So, I am new to the Mac world, and normally I wouldn't even be in it. I'm a really big Linux and 7 guy. But, I saw this Power Mac G5 at a local computer shop, and they were asking 120 dollars for it. So I said why not right?

It does have a fresh install of OSX 10.4. And here are the specs.

Dual Processor 1.8gzh G5
8 gigs of ram
Geforce FX5200 Video card ( yeah, that's not staying around. )
Has two 160 gig hard drives.
Pretty much in brand new condition, not a nick on it.

So, I don't know much about it. All I"ve really done with it is do some browsing, and do some youtube, which after I watched an hour of Kitchen Night Mares, Safari refuses to work and just crash's?

So, how do I turn this thing into not a paper weight?

Excuse the mess on the desk, I had to move three towers to make room for this thing

skinniezinho · Feb 25, 2012

With such specs why should be paper wheight?
Grab a read on the FAQ on my sig, pretty much what you need to know to begin is there

MAC MAN JW · Feb 25, 2012

Nice Mac!! and Welcome to the Mac Side

i have the the same mac as you only with 2GB Ram and a 80GB HD you got a very good deal on that mac $120 is a very good price with 8GB Ram

. You may want to put OS X 10.5 Leopard on it i run leopard on mine and it is just as fast as Tiger but with leopard you can run more up to date software. As for web browsers try TenFourFox if you want (Download the G5 Version) It is A optimized version of FireFox for PowerPc Macs it works with Tiger and Leopard The real FireFox is no longer made for PowerPc macs so if you want firefox use tenfourfox:http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/).

pistooli · Feb 25, 2012

Wow! Nice one. I hope that "you get used" to the Mac world soon. Your machine is still a very capable computer.

I would put Leopard on it for a start.

G51989 · Feb 25, 2012

skinniezinho said:
With such specs why should be paper wheight?
Grab a read on the FAQ on my sig, pretty much what you need to know to begin is there

Well it is a Mac

. Just kidding. I'm not sure what to do with it. But I did check out your FAQ. It sucks that decent video cards are crazy computers. I'd love a 6800, and to get the Mac Version of Doom 3, as I never actually got around to play it, and I would love to get the Mac Version of Elite Force 2. The Mac version is WAY cheaper than the PC version, I have it torrented on my main rig. But, I've always wanted a Boxed copy. Tons of Games I want to get for my Mac, but there are 5-6 of them I could not see this POS FX5200 handling. Hell, the first computer I ever built myself in high school didn't have anything close to that ******, I think I had a 6600GT.

Another question, jesus christ. I've NEVER seen a computer put out this kind of heat before. My main rig is a Phenom AMD 8 core, with 16 gigs of ram, and an ATi 6970 ( I think, forget atm ). 6 Hard drives, and two blue ray drives. And it doesn't put out half the heat this thing does, is that normal? All the fans appear to be working just fine, and there isn't a spec of dust in it.

Really? I always thought that Power PCs were done for. Thought the G5s were super duper slow like the G3s and G4s.

And yeah, I got a bunch of the recommended programs going, the only problem is, Apple is retarded and doesn't give your a powered MIC IN >_<

Brad9893 · Feb 25, 2012

The G5's were notorious for the amount of heat that they put out. I would say that what you are experiencing is completely normal. There is a reason that the front of the case has so many little holes. Apple needed to get as much air through as possible to cool off the heat output.

That's the reason there is only room for two HD bays and one optical drive. They needed to use the room for more cooling. The Mac Pro uses the exact same case, but it has room for four HD bays and two optical drives because Apple didn't have to devote as much room for cooling.

G51989 · Feb 25, 2012

Brad9893 said:
The G5's were notorious for the amount of heat that they put out. I would say that what you are experiencing is completely normal. There is a reason that the front of the case has so many little holes. Apple needed to get as much air through as possible to cool off the heat output.

That's the reason there is only room for two HD bays and one optical drive. They needed to use the room for more cooling. The Mac Pro uses the exact same case, but it has room for four HD bays and two optical drives because Apple didn't have to devote as much room for cooling.

Yeah, I am doing a bit of research on them. Now I see why they never made a G5 laptop. These heat sinks are retarded huge, like twice the size of the PASSIVE cooler I had on my old Athlon X2.

Any place to actually find OSX 10.5? Cant seem to find it for sale anywhere.

Video cards are gonna be an issue, an FX5200 simply isn't gonna do it for me. I think my dads dell had one of those when I was like....16, so like 7 years ago lol?

I do like it so far, I don't like how OSX assumes your retarded. But the computer itself has zero slow down issues.

ghett0tech · Feb 25, 2012

i loooooved my g5, no need for a paperweight. it can easily be used to be a very viable machine. congrats on your first mac, enjoy.

Brad9893 · Feb 25, 2012

G51989 said:
Yeah, I am doing a bit of research on them. Now I see why they never made a G5 laptop. These heat sinks are retarded huge, like twice the size of the PASSIVE cooler I had on my old Athlon X2.

Any place to actually find OSX 10.5? Cant seem to find it for sale anywhere.

Video cards are gonna be an issue, an FX5200 simply isn't gonna do it for me. I think my dads dell had one of those when I was like....16, so like 7 years ago lol?

I do like it so far, I don't like how OSX assumes your retarded. But the computer itself has zero slow down issues.

That's partially the reason for the Intel switch. IBM wasn't making too many advances with the G5. They put out too much heat and used too much power to be used in a portable. Also, the clock speeds weren't increasing fast enough and the competition was getting ahead. When the Power Mac G5 was introduced Steve Jobs said they would be at 3.0 GHz in a year. They never got there in two or three years.

I am not quite sure where to buy Leopard discs. I checked on eBay and I found a few. There might be better places to purchase though. However, let me make you aware of something (in case you don't already know). Make sure to buy the correct discs. You'll need a retail version of Leopard because if you buy discs that came with someone's old Mac, they won't install. As far as I know, there are two colors of discs. The gray ones are the ones that come with the machines, and the black ones are the retail ones you would need.

As for the graphics card, I would say you are close with the time. I think your Power Mac would have been made around 2003-2004.

Also, why do you think that OS X assumes you are retarded?

vohdoun · Feb 26, 2012

Brad9893 said:
The G5's were notorious for the amount of heat that they put out. I would say that what you are experiencing is completely normal. There is a reason that the front of the case has so many little holes. Apple needed to get as much air through as possible to cool off the heat output.

That's the reason there is only room for two HD bays and one optical drive. They needed to use the room for more cooling. The Mac Pro uses the exact same case, but it has room for four HD bays and two optical drives because Apple didn't have to devote as much room for cooling.

I don't know. The backside of my G5 is never really that warm. Can hold my hand over the vents and never get burned. My Dual 2.7 runs cooler than my CrossFire PC even though they're 45nm cards in a closed room.

Brad9893 said:
That's partially the reason for the Intel switch. IBM wasn't making too many advances with the G5. They put out too much heat and used too much power to be used in a portable.

Thats another weird thing. When my G5 is on it uses less power than the Mac Pro according to my electricity monitoring device that taps into the electrics box. I'm well over 1kilowatt when the Mac Pro is on. When it's off the G5 idles around 550 watt with other devices and never peaks above 900 watt.

Brad9893 · Feb 26, 2012

vohdoun said:
I don't know. The backside of my G5 is never really that warm. Can hold my hand over the vents and never get burned. My Dual 2.7 runs cooler than my CrossFire PC even though they're 45nm cards in a closed room.

Thats another weird thing. When my G5 is on it uses less power than the Mac Pro according to my electricity monitoring device that taps into the electrics box. I'm well over 1kilowatt when the Mac Pro is on. When it's off the G5 idles around 550 watt with other devices and never peaks above 900 watt.

Well, I am not speaking from personal experience. I never had a G5. I am just citing what the general consensus has been. All I know is that it is well known that the G5's were too power hungry to be put in a laptop and gave off too much heat. I think during the MacBook Pro intro at WWDC 2006, Steve Jobs even had graphs that showed the performance per watt. The Mac Pro uses Xeon processors, so they might use more power. I can't be sure. The G5 was compared a lot to the Core Duo when it came to power usage, but I am not sure if anyone compared it to the Xeon. After all, with a desktop tower, the concern would have been lower.

Looking on Wikipedia, it says that all Dual 2.7 were liquid cooled. I would assume that's why yours ran cool? Again, that just shows that they did put out a lot of heat. If they didn't, no G5 machines would have needed to be liquid cooled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5#Water_Cooling_Problems

MovieCutter · Feb 26, 2012

lpratt3 · Feb 27, 2012

New here and also new owner of a PowerMac G5

I bought a PowerPC G5 dual 2.0 with 1.5gb of Ram and a 160gb HD. I've since upgraded and added a 2TB HD for the drive B slot. I'd like to make it the primary drive, but I don't own a retail copy of Leopard. Can anyone help me on that?

I ordered 4gb of RAM, but when I attempted to install it it turns out that they sent the wrong RAM as the groove in the chips is off by about 1/8 inch. Hopefully the next set will be correct.

Can anyone tell me what graphics card I should be looking at to run the G5 on my HDTV? Maybe one with an HDMI out?

I'd also like to add a BluRay drive to this thing. Is it possible and has anyone done it?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

G51989 · Mar 1, 2012

Does anyone know, where to find a cheap video card? Thing FX5200 sucks.

G51989 · Mar 1, 2012

My other main compliment with this thing besides the dumpster Video Card, and lack of being able to buy OSX 10.5. Is that, even while just watching YouTube and playing a few game Demos, this thing goes into totally insane " OH MY GOD I"M OVERHEATING " mode, over and over again, the fans get so loud its insane, my crazy PC rig with 20 times the power and twice the fans NEVER gets close to this loud. Is that normal? I air dusted the HELL out of everything, even the CPU cooler heatset, not a spot of dust in it, and temps seem normal for a G5, but damn, so loud lol

dmueller6 · Mar 1, 2012

Keep an eye on fleabay, I got lucky and got a 6800 ultra 256mb card Mac version for 40 shipped. It replaced a fx5200, it made a big difference. Next is to up my ram from 2 to at least 4 gigs. Maybe add a second hard drive. I see the 160 getting full soon.

Nova77 · Mar 1, 2012

G51989 said:
My other main compliment with this thing besides the dumpster Video Card, and lack of being able to buy OSX 10.5. Is that, even while just watching YouTube and playing a few game Demos, this thing goes into totally insane " OH MY GOD I"M OVERHEATING " mode, over and over again, the fans get so loud its insane, my crazy PC rig with 20 times the power and twice the fans NEVER gets close to this loud. Is that normal? I air dusted the HELL out of everything, even the CPU cooler heatset, not a spot of dust in it, and temps seem normal for a G5, but damn, so loud lol

Flash is sh** on a powerpc, so it would be fairly normal to see your G5 heat a lot more than it should while playing youtube videos. Flash eats powerpc cpu like 100% and can't even make good fluid video playback. I don't watch flash youtube videos anymore on my G4 laptop because it heats too much.

Try MacTubes.

I can't tell bout game demos, you would have to list em I guess...

G51989 · Mar 1, 2012

Nova77 said:
Flash is sh** on a powerpc, so it would be fairly normal to see your G5 heat a lot more than it should while playing youtube videos. Flash eats powerpc cpu like 100% and can't even make good fluid video playback. I don't watch flash youtube videos anymore on my G4 laptop because it heats too much.

Try MacTubes.

I can't tell bout game demos, you would have to list em I guess...

Well I am using mactube, I really like it. And I still REALLY like this computer. I'm on it right now. Tho I didn't spring for the Mac Keyboard and mouse. Because I don't care how much you love Apple, they make terrible keyboards, and terrible mice, and one click is stupid.

Yeah I use Mac Tube, after about 5 mintues, **** gets loud

So far, I have the HALO Demo, Doom III Demo, and the Battlefiled 1942 Demo, as well as a few others of a similar vintage. I ordered that, and a few other Mac PPC games including Elite Force 2, so I'd hate to see it turn into a space heater lol and with those demos, I can feel the heat from under my LED almost lol

Nova77 · Mar 1, 2012

G51989 said:
Well I am using mactube, I really like it. And I still REALLY like this computer. I'm on it right now. Tho I didn't spring for the Mac Keyboard and mouse. Because I don't care how much you love Apple, they make terrible keyboards, and terrible mice, and one click is stupid.

Yeah I use Mac Tube, after about 5 mintues, **** gets loud

So far, I have the HALO Demo, Doom III Demo, and the Battlefiled 1942 Demo, as well as a few others of a similar vintage. I ordered that, and a few other Mac PPC games including Elite Force 2, so I'd hate to see it turn into a space heater lol and with those demos, I can feel the heat from under my LED almost lol

Don't forget to set Mactubes prefs to "quicktime player" instead of flash. If not, it won't make any difference.

As for the games.... hmmmm I know mac doom 3 isn't exactly the best mac port so its tough on the CPU. All I can say..... But all of this sounds weird... You should download temperature monitor to see where the heat comes from.

P.S.: The new mac Keyboard is the best I have ever had (the extended, wired one). Apple mouse sucks, agreed.

G51989 · Mar 1, 2012

Nova77 said:
Don't forget to set Mactubes prefs to "quicktime player" instead of flash. If not, it won't make any difference.

As for the games.... hmmmm I know mac doom 3 isn't exactly the best mac port so its tough on the CPU. All I can say..... But all of this sounds weird... You should download temperature monitor to see where the heat comes from.

P.S.: The new mac Keyboard is the best I have ever had (the extended, wired one). Apple mouse sucks, agreed.

I got the temp moniter, its all within norms for a Dual CPU G5, nothing going odd, its just so loud its annoying, my retarded AMD 6 core rig that I dumped 2500 into awhile ago ( and actually just picked up a 650 dollar ATi video card for ) isn't CLOSE to this loud.

The g5 is quiet for awhile, until you start doing something. Then it goes nuts.

Yeah, I mean it doesn't do it all the time, but when it does, it becomes very clear when those Fans Rev Up

Chris230291 · Mar 1, 2012

Apple's keyboards and mice are good man. I got myself a magic mouse and it's awesome. I also really like the keyboards they make. And there is a 2'nd click.

The old ones might not be so good, i havent seen them in years.

Carbon Tiger · Mar 1, 2012

G51989 said:
Yeah, I mean it doesn't do it all the time, but when it does, it becomes very clear when those Fans Rev Up

Yeah they do make some some noise. I have a DP 2.3 and when I got it one of the first things I noted when opening it up was the sheer number of fans in it. PPCs in general get a bit on the warm side. Flash runs badly on most things not windows, linux has the same cpu % eating problem in my experience. Certain games can get it going as well.

As for the earlier graphics card upgrade questions in this thread I'd go with flashed PC cards due to mac ones can be hard to find/pricy due to age. A GS 7800 is amazingly powerful and is a popular choice and a flashed Radeon FireGL X3 mimics a 800X to the letter according to reviews I've read but isn't as strong as the 7800 but it does have duel DVI ports and is a workstation card so its benchmarks are a bit more specialized under certain kinds of workloads.

Milage varies of course.

G51989 · Mar 1, 2012

Carbon Tiger said:
Yeah they do make some some noise. I have a DP 2.3 and when I got it one of the first things I noted when opening it up was the sheer number of fans in it. PPCs in general get a bit on the warm side. Flash runs badly on most things not windows, linux has the same cpu % eating problem in my experience. Certain games can get it going as well.

As for the earlier graphics card upgrade questions in this thread I'd go with flashed PC cards due to mac ones can be hard to find/pricy due to age. A GS 7800 is amazingly powerful and is a popular choice and a flashed Radeon FireGL X3 mimics a 800X to the letter according to reviews I've read but isn't as strong as the 7800 but it does have duel DVI ports and is a workstation card so its benchmarks are a bit more specialized under certain kinds of workloads.

Milage varies of course.

My Dual 1.8 gets annoying after awhile, even during the HALO demo, its SO lound. You can hear it over the speakers unless you turn them up. And it doesn't stop. Oh well lol.

And, I do have an AGP Mac, So I'm not sure what to get, as far as I can tell the 6800 is the best I can do

Carbon Tiger · Mar 1, 2012

G51989 said:
And, I do have an AGP Mac, So I'm not sure what to get, as far as I can tell the 6800 is the best I can do

The 6800 isn't bad it's a solid strong card and not overly pricy. If your looking for maximum numbers the nVidia 7800 GS is the one. It was an AGP card that was never made for macs, however due to some really clever folks working with the roms on the cards they can be modified to work with a G5.

Luckily this is a popular mod choice and you can find them on ebay and a few private seller websites just make sure it's flashed for a G5 and not a G4 most sellers are up front about this however.

Bout the only concern on your end once you get one is you have to run a split off the DVD drive power cable so it can be plugged into the card to give it the needed electricity. But most flashed cards come with the needed wiring.

minifridge1138 · Mar 1, 2012

Nova77 said:
P.S.: The new mac Keyboard is the best I have ever had (the extended, wired one). Apple mouse sucks, agreed.

I kind of have to agree with that one.
The Mac Keyboard is not too bad, but nothing special.

The Magic Mouse is uncomfortable for me. Some people like them. I'm not one of those people.

Picked up a G5, and I know NOTHING about Macs :) Help!

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