I need some very quick advise, I need to know if I'm going to see a huge difference in speed between a 2.0 and 2.3 dual-core G5? I am only going to be using it fore Aperture 2 and Final Cut Studio 2. I figure if it was ok for professionals back then it should be sufficient for an amateur like myself today. I already know about flash videos like youtube and such not working very well and of course 1080p content, but I will primarily be using it for aperture, very basic video editing, maybe could just download the last "true" imovie, quicken 2007 for budgeting and serving my ATV2 with content via iTunes. Other than that I can't think of anything else I would use it for that I don't already use my Macbook (early 2008 2.4) for. $200 for 2.0 DC or 350 for 2.3DC Which should I go with?
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Powermac G5 2.0 Dualcore or 2.3 Dualcore
- Thread starter craigsharp
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Agreed. $150 is really not worth the difference (but if it has tb's of storage & much more RAM than the dc 2.0 then that balances it out slighty). $200 is about a middle of the road price for a dc 2.0 & it'll do what you want it to do just fine.
I liked the 2.3 machine very much, and have owned both -- it depends on the ram but I believe the 2.0 came stock with a crappier 128mb video card. If the 2.3 has the better OEM card, go for that.
Well actually the machines are from macofalltrades, the 2.3 has 2gb ram, 250gb HDD and the 6600 w/ 256mb ram, while the 2.0 has 1gb ram, 160gb HDD and the 6600le w/ 128mb ram. The funny thing is that yesterday the 2.3 was listed at 299 but today when I looked at it they had added the 2.3 w/PCI-X for 299 and bumped the 2.3 with PCI-E up to 349... Bummer too cuz i was gonna pull the trigger today... 
Well actually the machines are from macofalltrades, the 2.3 has 2gb ram, 250gb HDD and the 6600 w/ 256mb ram, while the 2.0 has 1gb ram, 160gb HDD and the 6600le w/ 128mb ram. The funny thing is that yesterday the 2.3 was listed at 299 but today when I looked at it they had added the 2.3 w/PCI-X for 299 and bumped the 2.3 with PCI-E up to 349... Bummer too cuz i was gonna pull the trigger today...
Why don't you call them on it and ask them to sell it to you for 300?
As my very rich uncle always told me: '"It never hurts to ask someone for a better deal"
And I would NEVER buy a Powermac with it's original HD which is what it seems like they are selling them with (those are the original specs) Ask them to sell it to you without a HD and see if they come down in price. Then get a 1 or 2 TB in there.
I'm good on hard drives, I have a couple 500gb WD Blues that i'll put in it, also my freenas box has been running flawlessly for a couple years on an old, and I mean OLD dell slim line P4 with 2gb ram with 1TB storage.
Here's what I would do, I'd wait until you see an auction for a 2.0 or higher and try to get it for the lowest price you can. I recently ended up getting my G5 2.0 GHz, with 2 GBs of RAM, a 160GB Hard Drive and a Radeon 9600 XT. I got all that for $130 on ebay. So for me, I would hold out until you could find something a little cheaper if you can.
Oh and note, not all G5s will come with a stock hard drive, mine came with a 160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive made by Seagate but it had no apple logo either so it looked like a replacement.
And one more thing, if you get it that cheap, you can use the price difference to upgrade your video card to a flashed card such as the Nvidia 6800GS/GT, 7800GS or ATI X800 XT that is if you get an AGP version.
Oh and note, not all G5s will come with a stock hard drive, mine came with a 160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive made by Seagate but it had no apple logo either so it looked like a replacement.
And one more thing, if you get it that cheap, you can use the price difference to upgrade your video card to a flashed card such as the Nvidia 6800GS/GT, 7800GS or ATI X800 XT that is if you get an AGP version.
So i bought one, but off of ebay, bought a 2.0 dual core with 8gbs ram, and 500gb hdd. I splurged a little bit for the one with the more memory as I was seeing the memory quite highly priced for older ram. Plus I wouldve put that much memory in it anyways, total price was 335, I realize I could've got it cheaper probably some other time, but I needed it now... Now just waiting on the shipping...
That's a pretty decent price considering it has 8gb RAM. I'm willing to spend £40 ($65) alone on just 4gb RAM for my G5. So enjoy it!
Well so I went ahead and bought another Powermac G5... This time a 2.3Ghz Dual Core with 2.5gb ram and the 6600 w/ 256mb Ram for the same price... Shoulda looked around a lil bit longer I guess. But I plan on swapping the 8Gb Ram into the 2.3 and selling the 2.0 locally on craigslist for hopefully not too much less than what I paid for it on ebay... We'll see...
So Powermac 1 came in!!! Arrived a little later than expected as I only had a few minutes to play around with it... But from what little I got to use it I think the 2.0 is very capable of performing any task I throw at it. When my 2.3 gets here on thursday I will be super stoked to get the memory transferred and get it setup to my likings...
Yea it came with 8gb that I will be transferring to my 2.3 when it gets here, not to mention I have a few 2gb sticks I'll try out in it too to up the ram for resale when my 2.3 comes in
You will never have regrets with the dual core 2.3. I have one and my upgrade was 16gb ram, ssd in raid0, quadro fx4500 video card, esata card, and 1tb esata external drive as data storage as well as I have airport extreme and bluetooth card.
Runs slick no hiccups with videos even at 1080p. I have been playing hd itunes movies with it.
Runs slick no hiccups with videos even at 1080p. I have been playing hd itunes movies with it.
Thats just impressive. How much did the Quadro run you? For another 60$ i can bump mine to 16gigs. But i was wondering if the RAM was a better initial purchase.
I cannot remember how much I have shelled out for the QFX. For the memory, I have upgraded it by 2x2GB pairs at a time. The SSD was a big boost for the performance, even if it was not RAID'ed it was still performing better than a fast hard drive with a larger cache. You can opt for a 120GB SSD boot drive and a 1TB internal storage.
Yes I too am interested at how much the video card ran you, I think 8gb will be sufficient for my uses, but I do have 4-2gb sticks I need to throw in there to bump it up to 12gbs...
That is one of the best PowerMac G5's out there im sure you will enjoy it very much
. My G5 i won off ebay is getting delivered tomorrow as well