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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 :D

torq.jpg
 
Oh noes, are you telling me that PowerPCs were not the golden age of Apple computers and in reality they were not as good as everyone says they were back then?

(I am just being a bit sarcastic)
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.
 
Over 4 posts with nearly a 100 replies the only other contextual information is the OP got a Macbook Pro in 2012.
Why not elaborate some @2aw ?

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.
 
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.
 
If you are wanting an old Apple desktop, I highly suggest looking into a 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pro, which can once upgraded with a Metal-capable GPU and SSD can run modern macOS releases like Monterey and Ventura just fine. A 2012 Mac mini could also be another option.
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?)
 
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.
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.
 
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.
 
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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.




 
After reading this amusing review of the Power Mac G5 http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2017/11/apple-power-macintosh-g5-flame-on.html

I usually don’t use desktops anymore (laptops are much more convenient), but I have an extra monitor + keyboard + mouse set. Should I get a used Power Mac G5 (they can be gotten for a good price in the local classified if you wait long enough), upgrading to either 4 GB / 8 GB / 16 GB of RAM: https://everymac.com/actual-maximum-mac-ram/actual-maximum-power-mac-g5-ram-capacity.html and use it to browse the internet with TenFourFox?


According to the link above, the:
Fastest 2 x dual CPU G5 geekbench is 3316
Fastest dual CPU G5 geekbench is 2259
Fastest dual core G5 geekbench is 2082
Fastest single core G5 Geekbench is 1047 (is this too slow?)

Fastest iMac G5 Geekbench is 1106 https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac_g5_2.1_20.html (is this too slow? Also see the lack of RAM on the iMac G5 compared to the Power Mac G5)


I would have a nicely designed aesthetic tower computer case and I theorize that a G5 with 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB of RAM (would even 4 GB work, is that still too low for the modern web? I have 16 GB on my MacBook Pro and I wouldn’t go any lower if I was buying a new laptop today) should be fast enough for TenFourFox.
  1. What is the minimum G5 CPU I should get?
  2. I think an SSD upgrade would be good too, they keep dropping in price.
  3. What is the noise level of the Power Mac G5’s? I like my computers to be very quiet, would I be able to swap out the stock fans for quiet (or almost silent) ones?
What do you all think?

What can be improved on this idea?

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!

:)
 
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.
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.
 
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