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Powermac G5 Worth Buying?

S

stoo31

macrumors member
Original poster
Dual 2GHz
5.5gb RAM
Brand New 1TB HDD

What do these run like? It would be handy to have at home as a file server and to use for a bit of photo editing. It has 2 HDD bays right?

I have a Macbook Pro as my workhorse but wondering if this is worth having as im being offered one pretty cheap.
 
Depending on the model you have your MBP will be faster in CPU bound tasks. As a file server, the PM will be most excellent. That is a shed load of RAM! Photo editing should be a breeze.
 
Buy it if the price is right. Just don't get highballed. Pay no more than 4-500.

Be warned that there may very well be anti-PowerPC people posting here telling you to buy a mac mini or save. Ignore them as it does not answer your question here.
 
Thanks,

Its been offered for £300 and the 23" ADC Cinema Display is being chucked in as well.

Its very tempting, am I right in thinking its got 2 hard drive bays?
 
stoo31 said:
Thanks,

Its been offered for £300 and the 23" ADC Cinema Display is being chucked in as well.

Its very tempting, am I right in thinking its got 2 hard drive bays?
Click to expand...

If a 23" apple lcd is included then it's a steal. I believe it just has 2 HD bays yes.
 
Wirelessly posted (Tomato\'s Kaiser phone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

One thing to remember if you plan to run it 24/7 as a fileserver is the power bills. That's why I eventually shut down my old g3 fileserver, and one advantage of a mac mini or mbp.

I think osx has some auto poweron and auto shutdown utilites that will help you set what times of the day you want it to be powered up.
 
get it, that is a brilliant price, also as it is a air cooled model you don't have to worry about the lcs leaking
 
Thanks for all the info.

I'm going to pick it up on Wednesday so maybe I'll post some pictures and let you know how it goes.
 
I have a PM G5 Dual 2GHz and use it as a file server and for editing photos. Yes, it has 2 HDD bays.

A few things:

It may not have an airport card, so you might have to use ethernet.

As a file server, it eats a lot of power and gets pretty warm.

For photo editing, it depends on what program you use and what graphics card it has. I had to upgrade my graphics card a few years ago to use any photo editing program. (I do shoot RAW, so that may be the reason.) And keep in mind, most current versions of software are intel only.

All told, I love my G5, it's been the most reliable computer I've ever owned and is still viable today.
 
I'm expecting it not to have airport or bluetooth both of which don't really bother me.

I'm thinking actually I might just shove another 1tb HDD in it and use it for storage/backup as I don't need a server as such at the moment.

I've got CS4 and I'm pretty sure that will work on PPC?

It's got a Radeon 9600 Pro which I think is still a capable graphics card.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
If you're just using it for backup, why not just get a Time Capsule? It's probably cheaper and much more energy efficient.
Click to expand...

If you read the original post you will see that he also wants to do video editing. Plus a TC can only hold 1 HD and doesn't come with a 23" ACD.
 
zen.state said:
Be warned that there may very well be anti-PowerPC people posting here telling you to buy a mac mini or save. Ignore them as it does not answer your question here.
Click to expand...


This is so true and I found it very obnoxious.
A forum user suggest I was on drugs and that was all he said. These must be the so called "elite". I really couldn't care less for thier opinion. Not every one has the $$$ not that they have the latest either, soooo

I paid 150 for 1.8 with out the video card or wifi/bluetooth card..
\Good luck.
 
stoo31 said:
I'm expecting it not to have airport or bluetooth both of which don't really bother me.

I'm thinking actually I might just shove another 1tb HDD in it and use it for storage/backup as I don't need a server as such at the moment.

I've got CS4 and I'm pretty sure that will work on PPC?

It's got a Radeon 9600 Pro which I think is still a capable graphics card.
Click to expand...

Yes, CS4 will run on a PPC.

Not sure, but it sounds like that is a 2003 model. I have a late 2005 G5 and I'm running CS3. It's tolerable only because I upgraded to a 256 vram video card.

That Radeon 9600 Pro may only have 64 vram, if so you're better off sticking with the Macbook pro for CS4.

It's still a good deal because of the 23" ACD. You could hook it up to your Macbook Pro. That would be sweet.
 
Must say I am very pleased I bought this, runs as quhttp://images.macrumors.com/vb/images/icons/icon14.gifick as my macbook pro. The Cinema Display is good but is clearly a little worn out, its the original ACD HD so must have been running nearly ten years.

The G5 runs CS4 no problem, bit juddery when zooming in and out but nothing major.

Didn't have wifi so took an old belkin pci card out of my very old PC slotted it in. Booted powermac up and it asked to join a network didn't even have to install drivers!

Overall very pleased, just need to sort all my files and HDDs out so everything is synced and backed up.
 
stoo31 said:
Must say I am very pleased I bought this, runs as quhttp://images.macrumors.com/vb/images/icons/icon14.gifick as my macbook pro. The Cinema Display is good but is clearly a little worn out, its the original ACD HD so must have been running nearly ten years.

The G5 runs CS4 no problem, bit juddery when zooming in and out but nothing major.

Didn't have wifi so took an old belkin pci card out of my very old PC slotted it in. Booted powermac up and it asked to join a network didn't even have to install drivers!

Overall very pleased, just need to sort all my files and HDDs out so everything is synced and backed up.
Click to expand...
😀
 
Suggestion for the OP

Consider the PM G5 2.3 Dual core.. Its just as fast as the Quad-core which is what I had, but one thing it has that my quad didn't have: Non-LCS in it. The dual core 2.3 is really a nice system and I might pick one up myself since although I had an almost brand new G5 Quad with the panasonic LCS(more reliable), I'd prefer the dual core 2.3.
 
Roman23 said:
Consider the PM G5 2.3 Dual core.. Its just as fast as the Quad-core which is what I had, but one thing it has that my quad didn't have: Non-LCS in it. The dual core 2.3 is really a nice system and I might pick one up myself since although I had an almost brand new G5 Quad with the panasonic LCS(more reliable), I'd prefer the dual core 2.3.
Click to expand...

The DC 2.3 is not as fast as the Quad...the quad is nearly twice as fast. The second place system (in terms of speed) is the 2.7GHz. Regardless though, they are both great systems. I am seeing tons of Quad and Dual Core/Proc models in my area on Craigslist...
 
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