Is he an agent of chaos, despatched to set the noble PowerPC brethren against one another...there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth before the new order gains ascendance 
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Is this a good idea? Buying a Power Mac G5 to browse the internet with TenFourFox
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Yes and no.
In start of the G3 and G4 era Powerpc CPUs was better than i86 world CPUs.
Especially SIMD engine ( Altivec ) was far better than i86 implementations SSE and SSE2. Performance / Watt was also better.
But:
- as @Dronecatcher said, powerpc has less developers, so lack of applications and mainly lack of highly-optimized applications
- Apple strategy with special peripherals made Powermacs more expensive
- and mainly, further development of powerpc CPUs was slower than i86. For example: SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4... and Altivec remains still the same. And in the end of G4 and G5 era, i86 was only a little more powerful, but has faster developement and perspective. So powerpc lost.
And of course, in the end of Mac G5 bechmarks was specially selected, the same as benchmarks of first Intel Macs. It is a marketing strategy, you have to do your own benchmarks, if you want to be sure.
I have already moved on from PowerPC, I am currently looking for an Intel laptop from Apple.
Thank you all for taking the time and effort to answer my questions in the OP, you all have been very helpful.
What are you considering? You might want to post in the Early Intel forum for advice on models which would be a good value and those you'd likely want to avoid. It'll basically be the same cast of people that you see here.
Sidebar: we are not characters! (well, except you know and also, you know…)
Your quest is over......you already have one - a Macbook Pro.
What he said.
The modern internet is a huge CPU sink. 10-4 Fox just isn't up to it even on my dual 1 GHz G4.
See what version of Mac OS the current version of Firefox will run on and get the Mac that will run it. I think they just dropped support for El-Capitan, so a 2012 mini might be the low-end now. If Mac OS is not a requirement than a 2009 Mini or something else with a Core 2 chip running Mint Xfce might also do.
If you just want to play a 2010 Mac Pro with a Metal GPU, an NVME PCI-e card, and a USB-3 card runs Mohave exceeding well. And with Open Core Legacy Patcher it also runs Monterey very well. Apple abandoned support for that machine way too soon, but that is typical for Apple. (If they could write a Metal driver for the HD-4000 Intel Gutless Graphics on the 2012 Mini then why not for the AMD 5770 that was stock in the 2012 Mac Pro?)
A giant energy suck: it is now the “big block” motor of the ICE realm.
I envision the two this way. The early intel forum is full of N95 masks. PowerPC forum is full of Lucha Libre Mascaras.
BTW happy Cinco de Mayo.
Mostly the same actors but cast in two different films by the same director/screenwriter/producer.
You’re simply not going to use Tiger 10.4 or Leopard 10.5 for anything more than nostalgia or a highly specific reason (I.e. Word station). Even then, a G5 is overkill for this kind of thing.
Now if you’d not wish to run Tiger or Leopard, look at a Linux or MorphOS. Morph has the fastest run of them all, but is highly picky. It needs the original G5 tower or the June 2004 model with a Radeon card in there. Linux can run on lots more G5s, but you’re trading performance for compatibility.
Now if you’d not wish to run Tiger or Leopard, look at a Linux or MorphOS. Morph has the fastest run of them all, but is highly picky. It needs the original G5 tower or the June 2004 model with a Radeon card in there. Linux can run on lots more G5s, but you’re trading performance for compatibility.
It’s also worth mentioning that a MorphOS license is not free. It’s 80 euros per machine.
ahoi! The "modern" Web with a G5 is no fun.
Even if you are part of the User-Agent-Changer-Gang.
This is not a hardware-problem, that would be cool:
The more RAM i have, the more "Internet" i get.
Even with 10.9.5 (the last usable, before they went
to Ohio Express - Bubblegum) it´s a pain.
This is in my opinion some kind of selection.
Internet ok, but only for the one who can afford it.
Forget about the 3.world, they must dig the
rare earth elements to make us "happy".
Yeah, sometimes i get angry.
Even if you are part of the User-Agent-Changer-Gang.
This is not a hardware-problem, that would be cool:
The more RAM i have, the more "Internet" i get.
Even with 10.9.5 (the last usable, before they went
to Ohio Express - Bubblegum) it´s a pain.
This is in my opinion some kind of selection.
Internet ok, but only for the one who can afford it.
Forget about the 3.world, they must dig the
rare earth elements to make us "happy".
Yeah, sometimes i get angry.
None of what we do here is a good idea (macbookprodude would disagree 😂) but we don’t care! Will you have fun playing with it? Will you learn something? It so, do it!
He reached out to me recently on The Garden recently asking why some banking sites don’t work in TenFourFox as if I’d know because of my toolkit. 🤷♂️The last we heard from him, he was saying something like
I actually had the opportunity to take home either a Mac Pro 3,1 or a G5 or both for free.
I chose the Mac Pro as I just figured for the same amount of space the G5 was just too much trouble to mess around with.
I think I made the right choice as I still use the Mac Pro for various tasks where a G5 would have been a nightmare for me to try and find weird specialized hardware for it.
I think you ended up making the correct choice as well.
As a "wow isn't this fun to mess with" computer I guess the G5 would be fine, but not for anything else.
Fun read though, this forum!
Fortunately, this is not an issue with a G5. Thanks to the limitations of Apple's implementation of PPC, you get up to 2GB of RAM per application, regardless of how much memory you actually had in your G5. To get more internet you would have to fire up another instance of TFF somehow.
Bwaahaaahaaa. Hoo, I quickly began avoiding any posts s/he/they either began, and abandoned others that s/he/they onvolved themselves with....
He was unapologetically, indisputably a dude — it was, literally, right there in his name…