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Spare DC or Quad G5 ?
- Thread starter JoyBed
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I know how you feel... I live in Italy and here prices for PowerPC Macs are as high as the Intel ones. People see an apple on the computer and thinks "Oh, this must be worth a lot!"
Problem is I cant find ANY G5 in Slovakia, there is one PMG5 in Czech Republic but it is dual 970. In Hungaria the same... no PMG5... But in those 3 countries there is pleeeenty of G4 machines but for prices around 100 euros... I got my MDD for 50 euros. I will pay some money for the PMG5 but not that ridiculous ones on ebay... + the shipping... inside the europe the shipping would be reasonable...
Thanks for that tip! I found there this: https://www.ebay.de/itm/Power-Mac-G5-A1117/293619795419?hash=item445d1a85db:g:7NMAAOSwaZNe7PCG by the A1117 it is one of the 970MP family, but the photos are so poor that I cant see if it is DC or quad. Can someone please tell me which it is?
But still no quad... As I was browsing thru the geekbench database the dualcore 2ghz or 2,3ghz would not be powerfull enough... I plan on big upgrades on the MDD and i am pretty sure to say it would beat all the G5 macs except the quad. Here is the highest MDD even with the original 7455 and its pretty high: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2664246 So I plan a higher frequency than that, higher bus frequency, likely the same ram and sata HDD and SSD(with a bootable pb3214 pci-x card) so maybe even higher score than that.
I can imagine why you would want to have a Quad - however I would recomend to think about it again. Because they are rare - they are pricey. Even if you find one - most of them are broken or the water-cooling has leaked. They are massively power-hungry and noisy. I believe you much better off settling for a 2Ghz or 2.3Ghz DC. Much quieter, less power draw and no hassle with the watercooling. Chuck in 16Gb's of RAM and fast GPU plus an SSD if you like and you have a great system - assuming you can live with MacOS Leopard with its drawbacks.
Yes thats true, I would get the pcie(that sweet sweet flashed quadro fx4500) and sata and most of the other newer IO that I want, BUT! (i like butts) also the MDD would beat the DC in speed and the sata and usb2 will be in the MDD as well in the form of a pcix cards(I know mdd dont have pcix but the pcix cards i want to use are compatible with the 64bit pci) and i even found a usb3 pcix card... and thats something even the DC G5 wouldnt give me out of the box.
For whatever it's worth, I will say that I am happier with my MDD as a PowerPC Mac than my DC G5. The latter really feels more at home on Linux or BSD as a POWER-based UNIX workstation, in part since it had so few OS X releases available to it.
This is probably irrelevant to your original inquiry at this point, but for that fuzzy early-OS X feel, the G4 definitely does a better job.
This is probably irrelevant to your original inquiry at this point, but for that fuzzy early-OS X feel, the G4 definitely does a better job.
And also the G4 is more "modable" i would say. With the g5 you are basically stuck with almost everything stock besides the ram, hdd and superdrive. No newer cpus for swapping, no frequency changing, multipliers, bus speeds etc...
Personally I am not a great supporter of overclocking because of the extra drain it causes on all components. I used to do it with PC hardware in the past when I was younger - however this didn't last long because of the heat and instability issues.
When it comes to 15-20 year old PowerPC hardware I would advise extreme caution. Especially the laptops never had any head room for cooling and overclocking will for sure cause extra heat you will struggle to dissipate and therefore massively shorten the lifespan you have left in your devices.
I see myself as a custodian of my PowerPC hardware by preserving them over time. Cleaning them of internal dust, applying new thermal paste, changing the fan curve on the laptops for fans to come on earlier at lower temperature so these old CPU's and GPU's don't bake themselves to death.
That is just my 50 cents worth of thoughts ...
I never had a problem with overclock my wholw life, also my MDD has 7457 so lower heat output and higher clock tolerance. The 7447 is running in the DLSD’s for 15 years on 1,67GHz. Than why not NOS 7457 freshly soldered on the daughterboard. It even have lower voltage and right now im not even at 1,67GHz just at 1,5GHz. I plan 1,89GHz the same as my DLSD’s 7447.
I don't see how even an overclocked MDD would beat a DC G5 in CPU speed - unless you manage to hit way more than 2 GHz. And that USB 3.0 card isn't going to work in OS X due to missing drivers. Just my two cents.
Just look how high are the numbers in geekbench compared to G5’s.I don't see how even an overclocked MDD would beat a DC G5 in CPU speed - unless you manage to hit way more than 2 GHz. And that USB 3.0 card isn't going to work in OS X due to missing drivers. Just my two cents.
I wouldn't blindly trust them. For some reason my Intel Mac Mini got a GB2 score that is ~50% higher than others with the same specs.
I dont think they lie, in my case they always showed me my step ups in performance.
I wasn't saying they lie - but I can't explain why my particular machine scores substantially higher than others.
A 2 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac also scores 2500~3000 in GB2. There's no way in hell a dual 1.67 G4 can be as fast as or faster than that.
For the me the overriding question is: What can you do with the higher Geekbench score? Can it run Youtube in 1080p? Play Doom 3 or Quake 4 at reasonable level of detail and resolution? Are you faster in video editing, music making, programming, etc ... ??
I am pretty sure that a 2Ghz DC G5 is faster in every single of those aspects due to dual channel memory interface / faster RAM speeds, faster GPU's and a more modern architecture in general.
I am pretty sure that a 2Ghz DC G5 is faster in every single of those aspects due to dual channel memory interface / faster RAM speeds, faster GPU's and a more modern architecture in general.
No doubt that a newer arcitecture can be better but the theory about the youtube can be tested as soon as I complete the daughterboard to the specs I want, than I will run geekbench, some video editing tests, try to play youtube and etc... Just to see how much it improves.
... that would be interesting to see. My G5 2Ghz DC can play 720p Youtube in Leopard Webkit just about OK. If you can get a Dual Processor G4 do play 1080p I will be impressed.
