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Picking up G5 PPC saturday

M

mikepro44

macrumors member
Original poster
May 18, 2008
86
0
Picking up a Mac Mini (2011) and a G5 PPC on Saturday.

What should I do with the PPC? Thinking of using it as a torrent/music machine..

Also, figure I'd let the girlfriend use it as a web browser ;)


What else should would be a good use for it?
 
1.8 tower

I'm getting the G5 tower + 2011 mac mini with two dual monitors, apple wireless keyboard & mouse for $600
 
Whether or not its a single or dual CPU G5 makes a lot of difference I think. It should be a pretty good machine for web surfing if its a dual CPU model, but maybe a bit too pokey to be and everyday machine if its just a single. Either way, it'll make a great music box.
 
I don't have server myself and I don't think I know about them a lot in general (the setup process etc.) but I have always wondered what benefits does the power hungry and big G5 tower offer instead of, lets say ARM -based small computer or even an Intel Atom box running a Linux distribution? Not to start a war but just wondering ;)
 
Zotaccian said:
I don't have server myself and I don't think I know about them a lot in general (the setup process etc.) but I have always wondered what benefits does the power hungry and big G5 tower offer instead of, lets say ARM -based small computer or even an Intel Atom box running a Linux distribution? Not to start a war but just wondering ;)
Click to expand...

A lot.

These were the top of the line computers back in their day. You either got the newly introduced Mac Mini, iMac, the Powerbook/iBook, or the Power Mac G5.

Power hungry, yes, but worth it. You CANNOT run something like Pro Tools, Logic, Autodesk Maya, or anything rendering software that depends on the processor and graphics cards. Maybe a really old version of Maya, but man, it would just be utterly slow to render scenes and it'd probably make your processor explode because it can't handle raytracing, shadows, and all the nice 3D stuff. Audio is especially hard because you can have about 100 layers of tracks being compressed together.

Linux is great, but you have to deal with not using standard/industry used applications, and have to figure out workarounds for everything. It's great for compiling, but I'd rather work in a OS X/Windows environment any day. It's had so much time to mature, yet hasn't. Ubuntu looks great, but pretty much nobody actually supports it other than the browsers.

That's how I feel anyway.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys, I'm excited to pick it up and mess around.

Haven't used a G5 since highschool :p
 
ARM could be fast but you'd be limited to a small range of software and distributions that run on it. Windows RT is not available yet, so its Linux or Linux derivatives such as Android.

Atom can run Windows but is slow, less power hungry but still slow.

PPC is still reasonably fast, can run a wide range of commercial software and is adaptable for server grade tasks. Server grade tasks don't require a huge amount of power, but unlike ARM based or Atom based motherboards, with a PPC motherboard you have a full compliment of 64bit wide PCI slots and you might have ECC RAM.

You have robust hardware that is set for the task which are basically IBM RS servers vs. cheap and unreliable hardware that is not fault tolerant in a server environment.
 
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