I just picked up a new PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 last night. The machine was owned by some kid whose mom got it from her office and hasn't used it in years because he didn't get Mac lol. It looks brand new aside from some minor moving scratches, starts up instantly as if it were new. I paid $300, judging from eBay and the other people who want $1000 on craigslist I got a good deal, what do you all think?
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New Old PowerMac G5
- Thread starter lethalillness
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Glad you all think I got a great deal! I'm so happy about it, it looks so sleek and powerful. Bootcamp isn't really a problem since I have a custom Windows rig with 12GB of ram I made when parts go on sale for dirt cheap.
Thanks for reassuring I got a great deal!
Thanks for reassuring I got a great deal!
Not the end of the world... who needs Windows?
Millions of people who develop dotnet apps.
Definitely a good deal, granted your MBP will still smoke it, but it should perform well for a 6 or so year old computer.
Millions of people who develop dotnet apps.
Touche!
But then again, I doubt they'd be looking at a PowerMac G5...
depending on the graphics card, you might get better performance in some apps (e.g. WoW)
(edit) oh, i5. Probably not.
I know you were only joshing. For me its pretty much a multi-platform world out there OSX (iPhone etc), 7 (.NET) and Nix (OS stuff), just no escaping. I'm ok with it.
Just no Bootcamp on G5's
That's not what I use my Macs for 99.9% of the time (hardly ever touch Boot Camp even on my MBP. I've got a real PC for gaming).
OTOH, my upgraded PowerMac G4 can boot into OS9 baby! Yeah!
Ok, that's not terribly useful to me either, but it's kind of cool to show some friends. I have older Office and Photoshop versions for OS9 and I can still print to my Brother dual-sided Laserjet from OS9 as well. Some older games will run in it as well, but for some reason my CPU upgrade mungles the sound most of the time in OS9 unless I re-install the boot header before I boot, but then it goes away on the next boot again so short of playing a game I don't have for Windows for that era, there's not much point anyway. Running an ancient version of iTunes is kind of fun, but most of my collection is MP4 not MP3 so I only have a couple hundred songs I could play anyway. I did like the Window border gadgets in OS9, though. They were kind of slick looking. But OSX functions miles better overall. My upgraded GPU doesn't have acceleration support in OS9 either, so the Rage 128 that came with the PowerMac was a lot faster in OS9 as well, but it does still boot and takes up almost no room even with a load of software so I keep it around.
In any case, the biggest limitation of some of these older machines is that Apple isn't supporting them in the OS anymore. HD video runs slightly below smooth here (not normally a big deal since I watch movies downstairs on my 93" projector based home theater not in my den, although I do have some pretty nice speakers connected to it in the form of Klipsch ProMedia 2.1, which I also use in my bedroom), but otherwise, this PowerMac can do most of the stuff my MBP can do (save Logic/FCP although older versions would work) and I have it on 24/7 powering my whole house audio/video system based off iTunes, Apple TV units and Airport Express audio only receivers. I have audio in 5 rooms and video in 3 and haven't used a CD or DVD other than to load them on the system in 3 years now. Until iTunes no longer supports Leopard/PPC or the system dies, I see no urgent need to replace it. It gets used 10x more than my MBP since I use it for most if not all my typical daily surfing, e-mail, etc. (since it's always on I just turn on the flatscreen monitor and I'm already there).
I just have to say that anyone who thinks they can get $1,000 for a 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 on Craigslist is an idiot.
$300 is a pretty fair price. That machine with a decent amount of RAM is still quite a productive workstation machine, makes a good file / app server, &c.
The only downside is it makes a fair amount of noise, throws out a lot of heat out of the rear fans, and sucks down a lot of electricity.
$300 is a pretty fair price. That machine with a decent amount of RAM is still quite a productive workstation machine, makes a good file / app server, &c.
The only downside is it makes a fair amount of noise, throws out a lot of heat out of the rear fans, and sucks down a lot of electricity.
I dunno about a PowerMac G5, but my 1.8GHz upgraded G4 Digital Audio is pretty darn quiet and does not vent much heat out the back. Admittedly, it uses the newer 7448 G4 which is both more efficient/faster and much less electricity hungry than the original for the same clock speeds. My PC is WAY louder as is my MBP when the fans are on 100% (which I use when rendering FCP, etc. as I do not want to overheat the 8600M GT, which has been known to become problematic at high temperatures). As for electricity, I think it uses around 300W, which isn't that high for a desktop tower with several expansion cards in it (I have a SATA card, USB2 card and a 9800 Pro in it along with two 1.5TB SATA drives and a newer DVD-RW drive and it's fully loaded with its maximum of 1.5GB of low-latency ram).
I got it for around $250 almost 4 years ago. I got the video card for $80 and the ram for around $50 and each 1.5TB drive cost about $100. I think the USB2 card was $29 and the SATA card around $40. I added an internal USB2/FW hub where the Jaz drive used to be for about $25 as well and the DVD-RW drive was around $40. The 1.8GHz CPU upgrade was the most expensive at around $400. So it has somewhere around $1100 invested in it total and I've gotten 4 years use out of it so far (it gets used more than all my other computers as well since it's on 24/7). Well it started out with 500GB drives which have been put to other use since then so I don't count those. But if I had bought a Mac Mini back then instead, it probably would have cost me probably about $200 total more with an external hub/drive enclosure setup and at the time, the Mini didn't have FW800 and its Intel GPU was slower for most tasks than my 9800 Pro is in this PowerMac and the DVD-RW drive was slower as well. Besides, back then a LOT of software was still PPC based and ran like crap on the Mini (e.g. Office 2004). So it was a bit of a toss-up. The main thing was I bought the PowerMac just to try a Mac out for the first time (toy basically) so I had to figure the initial investment being tossed out as well by the time I figured out what I wanted to do with it (i.e. full house audio/video server) and of course I had no way of knowing that Snow Leopard 4 years later would dump support for PPC entirely. Either way, it's probably just about as useful and will get about the same amount of use before I would upgrade again and this way I got a Made In USA machine and helped support 3rd party Mac hardware products, not just greedy Apple. I'm typing this message on it right now for that matter as I do most of my posts. It's downloading a torrent in the background and feeding a movie downstairs on my AppleTV on the 93" home theater screen through iTunes while I type. The CPU is averaging 85% idle right now. It's not bad for a machine originally made in 2001...not bad at all.
$300 isn't bad if its got enough RAM to be useful already. I got both of my dual 2.0GHz systems for $123 each, but they didn't have any HD's and only 1GB of RAM installed.