Powermac G4 400Mhz?

[ibookos9]

Okay i found this really great (i think) deal on craigslist where a powermac g4 400mhz is $115.00 and it comes with a keyboard and mouse and an apple CRT display plus the small round apple speakers.. It is running Mac Os 10.1 and has 768 mb of ram. It has a DVD rom drive and it has the ATI Rage 128 Pro video card. The picture shows it running Mac Os 9

So what i am wondering is
What can i do with this powermac? Can i watch youtube videos on it? I think that i may upgrade it to tiger or panther one day but will keep it 10.1 for a while i guess. Would it be slow? Is it worth the price and if u want i can give u the link to the craigslist posting.
Its the Gigabit Ethernet model.
Merry Christmas

It also comes with a copy of 10.1 on cd.

 

[Hrududu]

I'm gonna say its not worth more than $60. Thats only because its the full system and not just the tower. 400MHz is just really slow. There's a eMac 1.42GHz selling on my local Craigslist for $165 today, and thats a decent deal. There's also a 733MHz Quicksilver with 896mb and 40gb HD selling for $100 even. Unless you just have money to burn, I'd suggest passing on this one.

 

[n8mac]

When I used my G4 400 with Tiger on youtube it worked but was very choppy. I now use a G4 867 with Tiger and it does youtube well but I would consider it minimum as sometimes it skips but only slightly. But even with this machine I have to pass on high definition video.

I would take Hrududu's suggestion and go with an eMac at 1ghz or better. They are CRT screens but are much better than the iMac G3 screens. Good bargain. If you want to stick with it for a while and upgrade than a PowerMac G4 867 or better should do fine.

 

[Roy]

Okay i found this really great (i think) deal on craigslist where a powermac g4 400mhz is $115.00 and it comes with a keyboard and mouse and an apple CRT display plus the small round apple speakers.. It is running Mac Os 10.1 and has 768 mb of ram. It has a DVD rom drive and it has the ATI Rage 128 Pro video card. The picture shows it running Mac Os 9

So what i am wondering is
What can i do with this powermac? Can i watch youtube videos on it? I think that i may upgrade it to tiger or panther one day but will keep it 10.1 for a while i guess. Would it be slow? Is it worth the price and if u want i can give u the link to the craigslist posting.
Its the Gigabit Ethernet model.
Merry Christmas

It also comes with a copy of 10.1 on cd.

My G4 466mhz digital will be 8 years old in a few weeks and works great. It originally came with OS 9 and eventually I upgraded it to OS 10.2, which a good improvement. I've had 640mb ram for a good number of years, but 10.2 took 3 plus minutes from start to get to the desktop. The best thing I ever did with my G4 was to upgrade to 10.4. I'm running 10.4.11 and it takes less than 45 seconds from start to desktop. How much is it worth to me? A new Mac Pro and ACD; which is what I will replace it with. The money has been in the bank since 2005 and one day I will decide that it's time to upgrade to a Mac Pro.

BTW: I don't know about Youtube videos, but the porn videos work great on my G4. The motion is really smooth except on the parts of the movies that are supposed to be jerky.

 

[DZ/015]

Would it be slow?

By today's standards, yes. Web surfing in OS 9 or 10.1 is nearly impossible.

Best use would be as a retro-gamer, word processor or file server in OS 9. Not worth upgrading for daily use. By the time you buy all of the upgrades you would need to make useable, you could buy a mini and get much better performance.

 

[Cosmoza]

G4 400mhz is slow, unless you put money to it : more memory (SDRAM PC100 upto 2Gb -> expensive!) and faster graphics card (AGP, i.e. Ati Radeon 9800 Pro -> expensive!).

So basicly you'll be better with putting just few more 100 dollars to faster machine, either G4 iBook/Powerbook, Powermac about 1.0Ghz, G5 tower or just, Intel-processor Mac Mini. It's worth it. It basicly is up to what you want to do it, and how long you wish to be using the computer in the future. Best future proof would certainly be, Intel-based Mac.

This G4 is basicly on this current setup good for basic websurfing (install OSX 10.4 tiget to it), writing, listening music, that's all basicly.

 

[spinne1]

That is worth maybe $40 to me. Why? Because it has almost no good life left in it except for maybe as a word processor, or an iTunes jukebox, etc. The web is going to be very choppy. Encoding videos or importing songs, SLOW. Pass on this and if you must go cheap, save for an Intel Mac Mini. I have a 1.83 Ghz Dual Core mini (not Core 2) that I bought refurbished over a year ago and it screams compared to my upgraded Digital Audio G4/533 with a 1.4 Ghz processor card in it, with a 9800 Radeon Pro and 1.25 Ghz of ram. It would be cheaper to buy the mini than to buy a G4 and upgrade it to match my G4 and it would perform much better.

That said, there are many advantages to the G4 for a legacy guy like myself:

1. I can run all my old OS 9 games via classic.
2. I can run OS 9 natively on a different partition/hard drive if I want to.
3. I can install multiple hard drives, and multiple video cards, and other PCI cards.
4. I can install a FAST hard drive compared to a Mac Mini's hard drive.
5. I can install a LARGE hard drive compared to a Mac Mini's hard drive (but you can get a huge external for a mini, so it is not so great an advantage.)
6. Upgrades for the G4 are getting cheaper all the time and soon they will reach a tipping point when they become borderline worthless (much like the 68030/68040 processor upgrades became years ago, and then the early Power Mac upgrades, like the 7300 upgrade I have sitting around my house with no use for.)
7. Many applications (such as Microsoft Office 2004) are PowerPC native and run much better on non-Intel machines.
8. A G4 tower, while huge, still looks pretty swanky sitting under your desk.

I would take this computer if they drastically lowered the price and if you are extremely broke. That said, I would not run an OS earlier than Panther on it, and preferably Tiger. 10.1 is not really useable anymore and is dog slow.

 

[Roy]

.......
8. A G4 tower, while huge, still looks pretty swanky sitting under your desk.

.........

WOW! Now I know what to do with my beautiful G4 tower. Put a mini in it and just keep on computing, but at a much faster pace!

 

[Luftwaffles]

7. Many applications (such as Microsoft Office 2004) are PowerPC native and run much better on non-Intel machines.
8. A G4 tower, while huge, still looks pretty swanky sitting under your desk.

7. I'll have to disagree with you there. Rosetta is insanely fast. In fact, when you're dealing with a 400Mhz G4, even an old, worn-out Core Duo mini could keep up with it, if not beat it.

My Core2 Duo MBP runs Office 2004 faster than my Dual G5. Not all that surprising, considering Apple's put an incredible amount of effort into optimizing it for just that.

8. Agreed! If not for the functionality, keep it for the nostalgia! Plus, you could stick Linux on it and tinker around.

 

[jofima]

I have a PowerPC G4 466 Mhz with 640 Mb RAM, which still runs OS9, and I can watch youtube videos without any hazzle.

I have terrible troubles with some DVDs, though.

 

[Davy.Shalom]

Don't buy it man. Its worth about 60 bucks. If you want a mac desktop that bad, go for an emac. They are pretty reliable. Even better, go for a G4 MDD or quicksilver for just $100 more.

 

[TrapOx]

It would make a great paperweight, door stop or shooting target. Other than that, its really useless.

$115 is about 2x what its worth.

 

[KítscheñÇinqµe]

$20 (if 10.1 cd is the full retail)? 17" or bigger crt?
768 mb of ram is pretty good for 2000. i guess that's not the max recognized: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/mystic-powermac-g4-gigabit.html
personally, i avoid "one piece" junk. more parts to fail, higher cost than separate-part systems. (laptops, "stacked" washer-dryers, etc. obvious exception are modern mobos with builtin Ethernet, audio, etc if disable-able.)
old crts begin to fail, and repairing a crt in a one-piecer.. ugh... (but maybe the imac crts were better quality crts?)

jofima, os9 466mhz:

I have terrible troubles with some DVDs, though

I wonder if that's due to os9 relying upon the dvd addon hardware on the ati card? (if yours has that? CORRECTION: G3 has the addon child-card thing.)

OP, vid card upgrade: some links here might give models to look for cheap on craigslist. http://www.google.com/search?q=Mac+ati+|+video+|+graphics+agp+compatible+cards+g4+mystic+|+gigabit Hi-end agp2x should be < $15. Avoid any card with a cooling fan (Assuming you can find any ... I think most died years ago.)
IIRC reading, agp4x mobos (asus, etc) tend to handle agp2x cards, but the reverse is unlikely.
Looks like gigabit/mystic has agp2x: http://www.google.com/search?q=~Mac...gp4+agp+|2x+|+4x++cards+g4++mystic+|++gigabit