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G5 Quads for $400US

T

tayloralmond

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 26, 2009
446
9
Michigan, USA
$400 isn't bad, but they can be found for lower on Craigslist if you live in the right area. I find several in the San Francisco Bay area for $100 --> $200 range. They can go higher, but sometimes you get lucky.

Location, Location, Location.
 
They're not in the $700 range these days. You can get an early mac pro for that.
 
thekev said:
They're not in the $700 range these days. You can get an early mac pro for that.
Click to expand...

Here they get near 700 and MP 1,1 are close to 1k

The issue I have is My G5 BreekBench is 1900 G5 Quads GeekBench near 3K, MP 1,1 GeekBench at about 5200, my 2011 13 MBP is about 6400.

To put this in real world terms when I transcode a DVD to MP4, the MBP does it averaging 96 FPS the G5 20 FPS.

This makes me question the value of either computer. I guess if you need more than 16GB RAM the MP is it but...
 
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minifridge1138 said:
$400 isn't bad, but they can be found for lower on Craigslist if you live in the right area. I find several in the San Francisco Bay area for $100 --> $200 range. They can go higher, but sometimes you get lucky.

Location, Location, Location.
Click to expand...

I'm in the SF bay area. If you find a Quad for $100-$200 let me know!!!
 
GermanyChris said:
Here they get near 700 and MP 1,1 are close to 1k

The issue I have is My G5 BreekBench is 1900 G5 Quads GeekBench near 3K, MP 1,1 GeekBench at about 5200, my 2011 13 MBP is about 6400.

To put this in real world terms when I transcode a DVD to MP4, the MBP does it averaging 96 FPS the G5 20 FPS.

This makes me question the value of either computer. I guess if you need more than 16GB RAM the MP is it but...
Click to expand...

I think European pricing is a bit different from the US. It's definitely a different market.

http://www.macofalltrades.com/Apple_Desktops_s/2.htm

That's just an example, and it's a retailer, not a private seller. In the US $700 would definitely be a bit high present day. CPUs have definitely shot up in power the past few years. Unfortunately laptops are still a bit limiting for me. The annoying thing is that the shrinking volume has definitely inflated the price of workstations a bit. Apple obviously raised pricing on theirs at comparable builds. A couple of the others seem to have crept up too.

The G5 quad can take 16GB of ram, but the mac pro would make more efficient use of it. To explain that, you can run up to Leopard on the G5 (although they didn't do that great of a job in Leopard optimizations for the PowerPC models compared to Intel machines:mad:. Snow Leopard was where we started to see 64 bit applications. Even with Leopard applications couldn't really address beyond 3-4GB individually in a direct manner. They sometimes cached to ram rather than swap, and the OS could eat extra ram if it was available. You just didn't see the advantage that you could see from that amount of ram on a newer machine due to those limitations.
 
thekev said:
I think European pricing is a bit different from the US. It's definitely a different market.

http://www.macofalltrades.com/Apple_Desktops_s/2.htm

That's just an example, and it's a retailer, not a private seller. In the US $700 would definitely be a bit high present day. CPUs have definitely shot up in power the past few years. Unfortunately laptops are still a bit limiting for me. The annoying thing is that the shrinking volume has definitely inflated the price of workstations a bit. Apple obviously raised pricing on theirs at comparable builds. A couple of the others seem to have crept up too.

The G5 quad can take 16GB of ram, but the mac pro would make more efficient use of it. To explain that, you can run up to Leopard on the G5 (although they didn't do that great of a job in Leopard optimizations for the PowerPC models compared to Intel machines:mad:. Snow Leopard was where we started to see 64 bit applications. Even with Leopard applications couldn't really address beyond 3-4GB individually in a direct manner. They sometimes cached to ram rather than swap, and the OS could eat extra ram if it was available. You just didn't see the advantage that you could see from that amount of ram on a newer machine due to those limitations.
Click to expand...

Laptops will never replace workstations..but generally PowerPC's are not being used as workstations much anymore either. That was the long version of..if you're going to spend 700 on a Mac IMHO it's better spent on intel the intel will be vastly more powerful.
 
GermanyChris said:
Laptops will never replace workstations..but generally PowerPC's are not being used as workstations much anymore either. That was the long version of..if you're going to spend 700 on a Mac IMHO it's better spent on intel the intel will be vastly more powerful.
Click to expand...

I know that. Let me reiterate... workstation inflation sucks:mad: Oh and I agree with you on the mac pro. Personally I wouldn't touch anything pre 2009 at this point. People on here have been dropping 6 core chips in those, and they can be cheap "at times" here.
 
thekev said:
I know that. Let me reiterate... workstation inflation sucks:mad: Oh and I agree with you on the mac pro. Personally I wouldn't touch anything pre 2009 at this point. People on here have been dropping 6 core chips in those, and they can be cheap "at times" here.
Click to expand...

I think the Mountain Lion move will make the 1,1 and 2,1 much cheaper. Kick another 100 or so for some 5355/5365. You'd have a powerful machine for not to much money.
 
Good price for what it is, but unfortunately. Buying one of them is like buying a quad core machine that can only run Windows XP.

Even though I really do love PowerPC, I would never invest that much money into a quad G5 when you can get a Mac Pro for a couple hundred more...
 
Although that makes complete sense, there's just something about firing up a Quad and having it actually work that makes it a joy to own. With an overhauled water-cooling system, there's just something about it that makes it wonderful to use. No worries about leaking, and near silent operation.
 
I bought a G4 tower from Mac Of All Trades about 5 years ago. It was a bit of a gamble since many of the reviews I read of the company were pretty negative.

In the end, I got my computer and it worked though it came with a Radeon 7500 instead of the stock video card. This was an upgrade, but I got the sense that this sort of "didn't get what I ordered" happened often with them and sometimes to the buyer's disadvantage. In the end my experience was positive but I'd hesitate to recommend them.

As much as I love PPCs, I would get a used Mac Pro over a G5 these days, unless you have money to burn and want a G5 just for fun/a second computer. They are still great machines but they are only going to get older.
 
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burnout8488 said:
Although that makes complete sense, there's just something about firing up a Quad and having it actually work that makes it a joy to own.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I tried to explain it to my girlfriend. I said, "It's just so cool to think that this computer is considered 'out-dated', has been pretty-much abandoned by Apple, and yet it's still this fast." She just looked at me and said..."I just don't get what's so 'cool' about it." I know owning a PowerPC is not the most "future-proof" way to go, but it's just fun to own the big "finale" of Apple's PowerPC computers. Not to mention the fact that with a GeekBench score of 3700 (that's my personal score, the average is 3400ish I think) this thing is more than enough computing power for me seeing as my computer needs consist of watching movies, listening to music on iTunes, writing papers, and surfing the web.

EDIT: I checked, and the average G5 Quad Geekbench score is "3284" according to MacTracker. I'm not sure why mine's several hundred points higher.

EDIT (again): I figured out why, it's because that's the "32 Bit" Geekbench test, not the "64 Bit" test. The average for 64 bit is around 3500.
 
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