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2005 iMac G5 - Slow

P

p3t3rsn

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 24, 2011
25
0
Canada
So I recently purchased a 2005 iMac G5 iSight (1.9MHz, 1.5GB RAM, 150GB HDD, Airport Card) for $25. It powered up but the LCD was no good so I installed a good used LCD and installed a fresh copy of OS X Leopard. I wanted it for my 9 year old son so he could play his games on it. However, when he plays runescape or minecraft on it, its super laggy. The iMac is connected via wi-fi to my airport extreme with a 15Mbps download speed. The graphics on the game is pretty basic to me but are they still too much for this older iMac to handle? Or is the bottle neck somewhere else like a slow HDD?
 
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Runescape should not be too bad on that but you are just below minecrafts min specs. Minimum machine I would get these days is a Core 2 Duo iMac, even for young kids. Your iMac still makes a great email, light surfing machine or a "kitchen" computer. The hd could be an issue given the age but spending money on this machine would be unwise, IMO.
 
flopticalcube said:
Runescape should not be too bad on that but you are just below minecrafts min specs. Minimum machine I would get these days is a Core 2 Duo iMac, even for young kids. Your iMac still makes a great email, light surfing machine or a "kitchen" computer. The hd could be an issue given the age but spending money on this machine would be unwise, IMO.
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Thanks for the additional info.....was thinking of making it a "garage" computer seeing as it's worth so little to sell. I do have an extra 5400rpm WD green 2TB drive sitting around. Would exchanging the HDD with the WD help increase the iMacs speed for daily usage? Or not worth the hassle?
 
p3t3rsn said:
Thanks for the additional info.....was thinking of making it a "garage" computer seeing as it's worth so little to sell. I do have an extra 5400rpm WD green 2TB drive sitting around. Would exchanging the HDD with the WD help increase the iMacs speed for daily usage? Or not worth the hassle?
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It'll work fine. Better in your iMac than just lying around. ;) I find that the drives in all-in-one computers generally don't last more that 5 years due to heat; of course that varies by usage. I would guess you know the difficulty of opening up the iMac already.
 
flopticalcube said:
I would guess you know the difficulty of opening up the iMac already.
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Funny you mention that. Changing the LCD was pretty easy put when I had it apart I was thinking to myself that where the HDD mounting screws were located I wasn't really looking forward to having to change the HDD
 
flopticalcube said:
It'll work fine. Better in your iMac than just lying around. ;) I find that the drives in all-in-one computers generally don't last more that 5 years due to heat; of course that varies by usage. I would guess you know the difficulty of opening up the iMac already.
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For some technically and mechanically challenge individual it would be a pain in the a** opening an iMac or anything. But may be not for the OP. It seems that he had replaced the LCD by himself. So it would be a walk in the park for him replacing the HDD on his iMac. A 7200rpm HDD would do the trick.
 
Nameci said:
A 7200rpm HDD would do the trick.
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I am concerned my 5400RPM WD Green 2TB drive is too slow to make any real world difference. I know with Windows, the random access speeds of the 7200 makes a noticeable speed improvement but I am not too sure about the OS X (new to the mac world). I got rid of all my 7200RPM HDDs a long time ago when I switched to SSD's :( and like flopticalcube mentioned the iMac isn't really worth spending money on...or at least any more money.
 
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A machine speed is very subjective, what might be slow for you is fast for me. I believe that snappiness of a certain application is not based on hardware all throughout. It is based on the optimized code running on a specific hardware. It all boils down on what are you planning to use the iMac for. If it is just for casual internet surfing it would work fine. Please see my signature, I still have those old pieces of equipment. It was not for nostalgia, but those equipments are still working fine and serve its purpose. Old SATA 7200rpm drives are cheap. But if you don't want to spend any dime on it, an old 5400 rpm HDD is just fine.
 
25 bucks for an amazing imac!? :eek: Damn lucky you are! Do not sell this thing.
 
mabaker said:
25 bucks for an amazing imac!? :eek: Damn lucky you are! Do not sell this thing.
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I am not feeling too lucky after spending an additional $100USD for a screen then not being able to have it perform the tasks I wanted it to :mad:
Maybe I am just spoiled with the performance of my 2011 MBP and my gaming PC, the iMac just seems so slow to me. I am considering throwing in my sata2 WD Black 500Gb drive. But its the iSight edition and the hard drive mounting screws are completely buried. So I hesitate to do all that work when I am not really sure the WD HDD will make much really world difference.
 
I'm with you there, I dont think you're going to notice much difference either. The processor is really the bottleneck. I went to a striped RAID layout on my old 2.0 Powermac expecting improvements but noticed nothing, even using brand new HDs coming from the OEM 2005 160gig drive. The CPU simply maxes out with simple tasks, and thats probably your issue as well.

Cliffs: Your slowdown is not a result of a maxed out hard drive, slowdowns caused elsewhere
 
I can't imagine having that machine without maxing the ram to 2.5gbs.

Bigger faster hard drive, too. I always wanted that G5 but hated that you couldn't VESA mount that model like the previous G5 iMacs.
 
Truth be told all the PPC computers are still workhorses unless it comes to Flash, Java etc. If you were just to run ProTools, Adobe Suite CS3, iMovie etc the machine would behave on par with current Apple offerings, similar performance output. If however you wish to play games (through web plugins) that en masse are optimized to work with Intel (and have always been) then the PPC clash with reality. It’s like trying to get Windows 3.1 to work on the original Mac. :(
 
mabaker said:
Truth be told all the PPC computers are still workhorses unless it comes to Flash, Java etc. If you were just to run ProTools, Adobe Suite CS3, iMovie etc the machine would behave on par with current Apple offerings, similar performance output. If however you wish to play games (through web plugins) that en masse are optimized to work with Intel (and have always been) then the PPC clash with reality. It’s like trying to get Windows 3.1 to work on the original Mac. :(
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This.

Old macs really are workhorses until you throw Flash and Java at them. However, when using native apps, they'll treat you right.
 
burnout8488 said:
The processor is really the bottleneck. I went to a striped RAID layout on my old 2.0 Powermac expecting improvements but noticed nothing, even using brand new HDs coming from the OEM 2005 160gig drive. The CPU simply maxes out with simple tasks, and thats probably your issue as well.

Cliffs: Your slowdown is not a result of a maxed out hard drive, slowdowns caused elsewhere
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I think you 100% correct here

California said:
I can't imagine having that machine without maxing the ram to 2.5gbs.

Bigger faster hard drive, too. I always wanted that G5 but hated that you couldn't VESA mount that model like the previous G5 iMacs.
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I thought about upping the ram but in activity monitor it barely ever goes past 1GB now so why bother?
 
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