PowerMac G5

[bse5150]

I'm looking at buying a PowerMac G5 computer. It's the late 2004 model with dual 2.0 GHz G5 processors.

It doesn't come with a hard drive or a video card. The hard drive would be easy to source, but I'm not certain about the video card.

Anyway, I have two questions: 1) How easy is it to find a compatible video card? 2) Is there anything I should know about these machines before I buy it?

Thanks

 

[chibiterasu]

I'm looking at buying a PowerMac G5 computer. It's the late 2004 model with dual 2.0 GHz G5 processors.

It doesn't come with a hard drive or a video card. The hard drive would be easy to source, but I'm not certain about the video card.

Anyway, I have two questions: 1) How easy is it to find a compatible video card? 2) Is there anything I should know about these machines before I buy it?

Thanks

That's not a bad machine at all, yeah hard drive is easy, the G5 is picky if you were looking at an ssd in the future.

1) eBay is your best friend for finding a video card, your model takes an AGP
Card and at a guess probably has the nvidia 5200fx, the problem is finding a graphics card for a reasonable price but some thing like the 9600 or 9650 are a reasonable upgrade, things like the nvidia 6800 gt/ultra or ati x800/x850 xt are normally a pretty penny. Someone might chime in with PC Cards that have been flashed.

2. My powermac's power supply died about 2 weeks after I brought so watch out them, the solider on the logic board near the ram slots is also prone to giving up leading to undetected ram. It's an air cooled model so no liquid cooling to deal with but I would consider re thermal pasting the CPUs at somepoint.

 

[bse5150]

Thanks for the info... much appreciated.

 

[bunnspecial]

There are no major issues I'm aware of with that particular model G5.

As mentioned above, you have quite a few GPU options. The 9600XT is a decent mix of price vs. performance. I wouldn't wasted the money buying a Mac Edition FX5200-the 9600 is a much better card and isn't that much more expensive.

At least among factory cards, the X850 is at the top of the heap, followed by the X800 and the the GEForce 6800 Ultra. You will sometimes get lucky and find these cheap(a friend sent me a timely link on my X800XT) but in general they're probably overkill for much beyond bragging rights . Of these, I'm rather partial to the 6800. Among other things, it can drive two 30" Cinemas(although I don't have one-let alone two). On the downside, it is a dual height card.