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Buying a G5

TheG3Guy said:
DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE. I recently bought a Dual 2GHz G5 off ebay with 3.5gb ram and this thing BLOWS my mac mini away. I dont care if its core2duo, the graphics on the mini are HORRIBLE and my G5 Easily keeps doom 3 at 45fps and the mac mini gets maybe 5fps. The dock is smoother under magnification, and i just think its faster and more expandable. This thing should be great as I do not need to run windows, as that is why I own macs....to escape that atrocity. :cool:
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Minis are one step above a mobile phone.
:D
 
zmttoxics said:
The AGP cards are cheaper because they made more of them. Replacement / upgrade PCIe g5 cards are 200-700 dollars. The Agp cards start around 50 bucks.

My G5 is a PCIE model, with 6 gigs of ddr2 ram etc. My 2.16 macbook with onboard video kicks the crap out of it. It only gets 20 more points over the g5 (120 for MB and 100 for G5) on XBench, but the vmware ability etc make the macbook the clear winner.

The only advantage to a 2.0 DC or DP g5 is storage. So if external drives really arent your thing, then get the g5.
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?? :eek: My macbook must be crippled, lol

Picture1-3.png


Some single G5's got even a higher score.
 
tompon1923 said:
?? :eek: My macbook must be crippled, lol

Some single G5's got even a higher score.
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Hmm. Yours is newer then mine too. I would bet you have a harddrive issue. What harddrive do you have? It plays a major role in your xBench score. I would look at testing it and possibly replacing it if it really is that slow. My 5400rpm 250GB and 7200rpm 320GB perform about the same (I only got a little higher on the xbench with the 320).

Here are my g5 and macbook benches, my macbook is a clear winner.
G5 (97, ignore swirl, i blurred out my name):
xbench_g5-1.jpg


MB (122):
xbench_mb.jpg
 
I don't think it's really hardware related because my score on geekbench is pretty sollid. I still have the stock 120gb but I'm probably replacing it by christmas anyway.

Picture3.png
 
tompon1923 said:
I don't think it's really hardware related because my score on geekbench is pretty sollid. I still have the stock 120gb but I'm probably replacing it by christmas anyway.
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I am not sure how geekbench does it, but xBench pulls actual read and write speeds for its harddrive score. So if the disk is having a bad day, you get a low score. I will run geekbench on my 2 rigs later tonight.
 
QuantumLo0p said:
Minis are one step above a mobile phone.
:D
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A C2D cpu is no slouch. Thats what the current mini's have. My 1.83GHz scores a 117 on xbench 1.3 and about 2400 on geekbench.

I'm a pretty serious geek but not a gamer and the mini is all the power I need. Sadly only about 5% of the people in the world with powerful computers really need them.
 
Yaris said:
I am probably going to buy this 1.8 DP G5 next week:
http://www.macofalltrades.com/G5_1_8GHz_Dual_Processor_1_0_160GB_SuperDrive_p/g518dp1.htm

I have read that some 1.8s have 8 slots for ram and can take up to 8GB but some have 4 slots and only take up to 4GB RAM. Is there any way to determine between the two?
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The 2nd revision of the Dual 1.8 (a June 2004 product refresh) was changed to 4 ram slots...I think as a trade off for making a Dual 1.8 that wouldn't cannibalize the Dual 2.0. It will be hard to tell unless you can get the product numbers and check them across the interweb.

Its sad that there are so many nay-sayers here about the PowerMac G5. When it came out...it was the biggest nerd-gasm this site had ever had (REFERENCE). I used the single proc 1.8 G5 PM for three years and it never let me down. I switched to a MacBook (for school uses) and have had to put up with a notable power decrease...but then again I never used Leopard on my G5. Tiger on the g5 rocked, though.

Also, it is interesting to note that prior to 10.5, Apple had been in the habit of releasing OS updates that actually produced speed increases on the same hardware (completely unheard of in Windows). I can vouch for these speed increases as measured from OS 10.0.5-10.4 on my eMac. I don't know if 10.5 was actually a speed increase (refinement) so much as it was a house cleaning architecture change for the Intel family. Good luck with your purchase and I hope your PM serves you well.
 
I basically want it to replace my mac mini which I use for iTunes and general home/media server stuff. I want to be able to put 2 SATA hard drives in it also. I don't need it to be as fast as my main computer but I know this is quite a bit faster than the G4 mini.
 
Yaris said:
I basically want it to replace my mac mini which I use for iTunes and general home/media server stuff. I want to be able to put 2 SATA hard drives in it also. I don't need it to be as fast as my main computer but I know this is quite a bit faster than the G4 mini.
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Yeah you will be able to get at max (currently) 3TB in that G5 with 2x 1.5TB drives. The G5 will be good enough for you. My G5 runs great and I plan on keeping it for a long time. I'd like to buy a MBP eventually or even a last revision PB G4. Who needs 8 cores to check their email anyways? For casual use, a G4 is more then efficient for most people. If you don't plan on playing Crysis or any other current game(isn't that what the Xbox 360 and PS3 for anyways?) or be editing 500mb PS files with 50+ layers or editing HD video, I don't really see the need for such a computer when a G5 (or G4) would suit you just fine. So what if Snow Leopard isn't going to be compatible with PPC anymore. How many people do you know that are still using Tiger? Even on Intel machines.
 
i have a dual 1.8ghz G5 RAID0 2x 500gb HDD, what i can say compare it to my new Macbook 13" late 2008, G5 is noticeable slower then MB. While heavy browsing on G5 with safari having acceptable lag(while scrolling the pages) worst when scrolling a pages full of Flash. Watching HD quality videos on youtube total jammed your safari(firefox worst). Im not sure is my G5 or wad but i just did a fresh install of leopard. After changed the stock FX5200 to 6800GT, it feels smoother but not a lot. The U3 heatsink(mem controller chip on the logic board) temperature rise up 5 Celsius, idle at 55c on air condition room. While playing world of warcraft i felt that the graphic performance is bottleneck by the CPU. Maybe i should get a 2.3 or 2.5ghz G5. About playing HD movies on G5, Any movies above 720p playing on QT is pretty jagged. After a while it went ok. On the macbook side CPU just ultilized around 30-50%, G5 uses 70-90%.

On macbook side ofcourse everything smooth. Just a temperature a bit high. Playing wow or doing intensive work e.g. Photoshop/aperture smooth. But i need a larger external drives to store my files.
 
g5 for sale

does this forum have a classifieds section?:)

I can put up for sale a g5 w dual 2.0ghz dual raptor 300gig raid and a ATI Radeon X800 XT for video. oh and 4 gigs of ram.. all for about 1k.

think about that.:apple:
 
rbnjr said:
does this forum have a classifieds section?:)

I can put up for sale a g5 w dual 2.0ghz dual raptor 300gig raid and a ATI Radeon X800 XT for video. oh and 4 gigs of ram.. all for about 1k.

think about that.:apple:
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Your pretty crazy. Just because you put nice harddrives in it, doesn't mean the value sky rockets. I paid 700 for my DC 2.0 G5 PCIE, and it is a newer /better model then yours.
 
rbnjr said:
does this forum have a classifieds section?:)

I can put up for sale a g5 w dual 2.0ghz dual raptor 300gig raid and a ATI Radeon X800 XT for video. oh and 4 gigs of ram.. all for about 1k.

think about that.:apple:
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Yes it does but you don't meet the minimum requirements to post or view it. I wouldn't try selling in this forum as a mod will delete your post. Also $1k is actually more then your machine is worth, even factoring in the upgrades.
 
For a dual CPU (not dual core), I wouldn't pay more than $700 no matter what upgrades it has. Plus $100 for a dual 2.7.
 
OrangeSVTguy said:
Yes it does but you don't meet the minimum requirements to post or view it. I wouldn't try selling in this forum as a mod will delete your post. Also $1k is actually more then your machine is worth, even factoring in the upgrades.
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Well then just how much is a dual 2.0 G5 worth? I would have thought $1K a reasonable price for such a machine (I mean, hell, stripe raid raptors would be the fastest boot disc I can imagine, and a X800 is no slouch). But, as you can probably see from my postings over the past few years, I am not as intuned with hardware as I was in college.
 
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