Powermac G4 M8570 Dual 1.25G £100 good deal?

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Hi guys, dont know if this is the right place to post so if it is wrong, please re-locate it, thank you.

I just met a graphic designer who is returning to her country so offered me her Powermac G4 Dual 1.25Ghz (customized processor) for around £100. ($200). It has 2Gigs of RAM as well, the cosmetics is not superb with some scratches here and there but overall seems to be a solid machine running the latest OSX10.4 build.

The model is a M8570 (MDD Firewire 800) and it has the default ATI 9000Pro graphics card. The processor I believe was upgraded with Sonnet or something like that but im not sure as she wasnt really sure either...

Is this a good deal? I dont know really what ill use it for but seems like a good buy?

 

[Southern]

Sounds like a good deal if you want to use it for medium-level usage (IE: not for heavy processing tasks like 3D rendering etc). The old Powerbooks were nice little runners and for £100, you could do worse. At least buy it if you think you can use it, otherwise buy it and put it up for sale or something.

 

[jMc]

That's a fantastic deal - the parts alone are worth much more than £100. I wouldn't hesitate to buy this.

Jx

 

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Thanks for the reply guys/gals!

Yeah I think Ill buy it as I think if I didnt want it, I could re-sell it again LOL.

Any ideas on how I may be able to make good use of this computer? My main machine is the MBP and the G4 is no compariso to it...

 

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Ok in the end, I got the MDD Powermac G4 DP 1.25GHZ 300G HD and 2G RAM for only 90 Pounds! (Roughly 180$).

Now it does not have Bluetooth or Wireless. Is it possible to install Bluetooth if it didnt come as default?

What uses can you guys think of for this as I currently already have a MBP which obviously outpowers this G4 in every way.

Thanks!

 

[juanm]

If you fill it with lots of gigabytes, it can get used as a music computer, file server, texture data base, folding, 24h a day torrent machine... I'd love such a computer!

 

[GreatDrok]

Ok in the end, I got the MDD Powermac G4 DP 1.25GHZ 300G HD and 2G RAM for only 90 Pounds! (Roughly 180$).

A very good deal. This is much more powerful than my standard desktop Mac mini G4 and that runs Tiger very nicely.

Now it does not have Bluetooth or Wireless. Is it possible to install Bluetooth if it didnt come as default?

Neither did my mini so I bought a cheap Belkin USB bluetooth adapter which OS X happily finds and works with just like a built in example would.

What uses can you guys think of for this as I currently already have a MBP which obviously outpowers this G4 in every way.

Don't be so sure. For some stuff my Mac mini feels more responsive, largely because I am using a firewire 400 drive for the OS rather than the built in laptop style drive. In this configuration there isn't much difference and for PPC apps the mini is way faster. Yours has twice the processing power of my mini and twice the RAM as well as a faster built in drive so should be able to keep up reasonably well with the MBP except for some of the more intensive CPU operations such as media encoding. However, I have done encoding on my mini using Handbrake and for MP4 encodes it does pretty well. H264 is another matter entirely so I bought a Turbo264 which makes it fly

 

[cubist]

Second the motion on the USB bluetooth adapter, I have mine on an extension cable that moves it to a more convenient location, too. Nice computer, and fabulous deal. Congratulations!

 

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Thanks so much for the replies, it makes me feel that I made a good choice.

I guess I can either use it as an apple tv movie server music server or on the other hand, I may 'pimp' it up a bit and use it as a secondary Logic Pro node workstation as well.

 

[chaosbunny]

That's a pretty awesome deal!

I wouldn't sell it if I were you, doesn't happen every day that you get such a great mac for such a bargain. It'll make a great file server, or hooked up to a big monitor entertainment center, or you can let it rip dvds while you are on the road with your mbp, or you can let it render something thats not in a hurry so you have your mbp free for more important stuff, or you can get some games like command & conquer generals and make a lan party with a friend, or ... ok, that's all I can think of right now.