PowerMac G5, is it still useful?

[Nameci]

There are other who really wanted flash. And I think they love the resource hog.

I have ClicktoPlugin on Safari, and for the times that I am bored and checkout you tube, html5 video plays very well even at higher res up to 720 on my G5. I set the default to be at 360 btw.

Even if there is no chrome in Safari or Firefox there are still alternative, Camino for PPC which is to me very efficient and lightweight and tenfourfox. And there is Mactubes if you want to view youtube videos without the stutter on lower spec macs.

 

[mac57]

I recently acquired a PowerMac G5 Quad from eBay for only $385. It came with 8 GB of RAM, the nVidia Quadro 512 MB video card and a boring white label 500 GB hard drive. I replaced the hard drive with a 120 GB SSD boot drive and a new 500 GB Western Digital HDD with 64 MB cache and loaded Tiger up onto it.

I can honestly tell you that this thing flies. Most applications load without even a single bounce on the dock, and everything feels very snappy. I have Photoshop CS3 on it, and its response is just excellent. I also have loaded Microsoft Office 2008 on it, and even it performs very well. I am extremely pleased with this machine.

For me, the only drawback is that I had to load Leopard as well (put that onto the HDD as a secondary boot) so that I could run the current version of iTunes and manage my iPhone 4 and iPad. So, I have to boot to Leopard when I want to do that sort of thing, but that is a minor drawback.

I love living PowerPC in an Intel world - think different!

 

[W123]

Upgrade to Leopard, its a far better OS for a Quad.
Also, get rid of that quadro and upgrade to the more powerful X1900.

 

[Nameci]

Nope, the quadro is more powerful than the x1900...

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

Nope, the quadro is more powerful than the x1900...

And it'd be a waste of money anyway, probably, at least for gaming the CPU will be the bottleneck as even back then, the most demanding of the games that'd actually run on PPC were generally not multithreaded.

 

[VanneDC]

As compared to most games now?

Still only single threaded..

 

[W123]

Nope, the quadro is more powerful than the x1900...

Bzzz, wrong.
VRAM is the only point of advantage for the Quadro.
I've tried the Quadro, 7800GT, 7800GTX and X1900GTO. The X1900 beats all of them for frame rates and smoothness.

And it'd be a waste of money anyway, probably, at least for gaming the CPU will be the bottleneck as even back then, the most demanding of the games that'd actually run on PPC were generally not multithreaded.

Bzzz, wrong on both counts.

All applications are multithreaded in OSX. How much they take advantage of it is up to how OSX can distribute the information its given.
Halo, Fable, Black and white, realMyst, WoW, Hordes of Orcs and many others all use all 4 cores. However, the GPU is the bottleneck not the CPUs in the Quad. With graphics on all games maxed out, the cores never reach 100% for any length of time. In fact I'm running a Halo server in the background right now and the CPU usage is evenly distributed across each core around 40-60% per.
The dual core and dual CPU models are a different story, they lack the raw processing power of the Quad.

Still only single threaded..

That is false information, see above.

 

[zen.state]

W123:

Don't try to dominate a thread with your delusions of what is true. Your delusions should be kept to yourself.

 

[mac57]

Upgrade to Leopard, its a far better OS for a Quad.

Well... that is a matter of opinion. The machine was delivered from eBay with Leopard on it, and I purposely "downgraded" it to Tiger, although I still keep Leopard around on it as a secondary boot so that I can run the latest iTunes. Call me a Luddite - I just like Tiger better, AND it was the "native" OS that the Quad shipped with - Leopard didn't start to ship until after the Quad was out of production.

 

[Nameci]

W123:

Don't try to dominate a thread with your delusions of what is true. Your delusions should be kept to yourself.

I fully agree with you zen. He is on delusion about what he believes in.

 

[simie]

Ask yourself this, what do 90% of folk use a computer for well here goes :

Watching videos off Youtube
Reading emails
Tweeting on Twitter
Facebook
Use a small percentage of MS Office
Watch a DVD
Play a game (get a game console)
Surfing the Web.
Itunes

The other 10% use their computers for :-
Video editing and rendering the final video
Number Crunching in one way or another
Photo Shopping
CAD / Cam + Rendering images

So why do people spend a lot of money on a computer when they don't really do anything intensive with it.


Music Editing

 

[Nameci]

Sadly, I belong on the 10%...

 

[W123]

W123:

Don't try to dominate a thread with your factual information. Your knowledge and facts should be public knowledge by now.

Corrected for accuracy.
OSX has been out for 11 years, if you still don't know or understand its basic operation you don't belong here.

Ask yourself this, what do 90% of folk use a computer for well here goes :

Watching videos off Youtube
Reading emails
Tweeting on Twitter
Facebook
Use a small percentage of MS Office
Watch a DVD
Play a game (get a game console)
Surfing the Web.
Itunes

All of which are naturally multithreaded by OSX except for the raw video in youtube.

 

[Nielsenius]

Would the G5 case be useful? Could you take out all the old parts and put in new ones to make it like a current Mac Pro? Or would that be exceedingly difficult?

 

[Nameci]

Just buy a mac pro and save yourself from all the troubles.

 

[Nielsenius]

Just buy a mac pro and save yourself from all the troubles.

Haha yeah, good idea. But, I think I'll stick to a MacBook Pro for now. I need that portability for school. A Mac Pro is pretty much my dream computer, though. When I have the money and room for it I'll buy one.

 

[W123]

Oh look at the attachment. All CPU's used, and....whats this.....SEVEN threads in a 10 year old game?!?!? I thought they were all single threaded?!?!?!?!?

And.... wow.... MAIL has 17 threads?
Look at firefox!!!!! 30 threads!!!!!

So guys, instead of trolling, try to learn the facts instead.

 

[Nameci]

Are you still attached to reality?

At least post something that is related to the thread.

 

[W123]

Aw, poor Nameci, don't be so bitter. Read the thread and learn how discussion forums work.

 

[Nameci]

I am not bitter. I don't anything personal. I don't even know you or anyone else in this forum, but I know one thing I am original as a person and not hiding from my handles.

 

[adcx64]

W123

An app can have 8475838573 threads, this doesn't mean the computer can utilize them.

Stick with the topic and in reality, nobody cares what you have to say 300D.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

Oh look at the attachment. All CPU's used, and....whats this.....SEVEN threads in a 10 year old game?!?!? I thought they were all single threaded?!?!?!?!?

And.... wow.... MAIL has 17 threads?
Look at firefox!!!!! 30 threads!!!!!

So guys, instead of trolling, try to learn the facts instead.

Fail.

Look closer. Halo is making use of a single core of your computer. Just because an app has multiple threads it doesn't mean the computer can multitask with them.

 

[brenden]

It's 300D we aren't going to change his mind no matter what. Let him believe whatever he wants to.

 

[Goftrey]

Someone ban W123 already! He's getting on everyone's nerves and he's trolling and speaking out of his backside all the time...

 

[MagicBoy]

Someone ban W123 already! He's getting on everyone's nerves and he's trolling and speaking out of his backside all the time...

I think you'll discover W123 is yet another new account for the poster previously known as 300D who was issued a permaban. You'd think he'd get more inventive than repeatedly opening new accounts with Mercedes-Benz related names for them to get closed a few days later.

Anyway I've RTM'd him. Again.