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What can I do with this Power Mac G5?

L

LIVEFRMNYC

macrumors G3
Original poster
Oct 27, 2009
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A neighbor gave me a Power Mac G5 in mint condition minus the hard drives. Don't know how much ram is installed yet. Serial(YM408ZJ0NVR) check states max 4gb ram and max Mac OS 10.5.8.

I actually have the perfect space for this monster size tower. Which will be hooked up to my room TV. I'm thinking about using it for offline storage and a media server.

Is it worth buying hard drives and and possibly max ram if needed? Any other ideas what I can do with this?
 
LIVEFRMNYC said:
I actually have the perfect space for this monster size tower. Which will be hooked up to my room TV. I'm thinking about using it for offline storage and a media server.
Click to expand...
G5s are hot and very power hungry and have very limited capacity to add storage. They're simply not good candidates for use as a media server.
 
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chrfr said:
G5s are hot and very power hungry and have very limited capacity to add storage. They're simply not good candidates for use as a media server.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about adding one of these for now to see how it goes.... HardDrive

The room I'm putting it is always ice cold from the ac, so that shouldn't be a problem. Note that I don't plan on using it as an always on server, just when I need it.
 
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@LIVEFRMNYC Your G5 is a single 1.8 model, which is going to pale in comparison to any dual CPU model. That being said, you have a maximum of 8 GB of RAM. Personally, I think 2-4 GB is a sweet spot for Leopard and any programs you throw at it, after all the programs are not being updated and will not increase in resource use.

That hard drive will work great in the G5, and a number of us run Western Digital drives. You may need to install a jumper to kick the drive into SATA I backwards compatibility mode, but aside from that they work great.
 
Altemose said:
@LIVEFRMNYC Your G5 is a single 1.8 model, which is going to pale in comparison to any dual CPU model. That being said, you have a maximum of 8 GB of RAM. Personally, I think 2-4 GB is a sweet spot for Leopard and any programs you throw at it, after all the programs are not being updated and will not increase in resource use.

That hard drive will work great in the G5, and a number of us run Western Digital drives. You may need to install a jumper to kick the drive into SATA I backwards compatibility mode, but aside from that they work great.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

So I will be good with one or two sets of this?
https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Apple...d=1469501217&sr=8-2&keywords=power+mac+g5+ram
 
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My friend has adapted PMG5 1.6 to a web-server with some other features. He did a lot of work to make it quieter, and now his G5 looks great in this role. But there is one moment — in our country electricity is pretty cheap, so it's not expensive to keep those server.
 
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Altemose said:
Those will work, but you may find memory cheaper if you go online to a site like Newegg and just get DDR 400 MHz RAM. There is no difference between regular RAM and "Mac RAM". Just make sure you buy matching pairs.
Click to expand...

Thanks again.
 
WalnutSpice said:
You can put two 4TB hard drives in them adding to 8TB storage
Click to expand...
Yes, and aside from the Mac Mini and the current Mac Pro, they're the only desktop computer Apple sold in many years which can only fit 2 disks.
 
LIVEFRMNYC said:
Does anyone know the best video card upgrade for this machine?
Click to expand...

Spending the money to drop a high end card is going to be money wasted as you only have a single 1.8 CPU. If it was a dual CPU machine I would say go for something like a 9800 Pro AGP card, but your machine would do quite nicely with a 9600 XT or a 9650 as Gavin stated.
 
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