Apple G5 - still useful ?

So I inherited a dual 2GHz G5 machine. Got past the C19 power connector "problem", fired it up, installed fresh OS 10.5.8 and - well thats about it .

Got to admire the engineering/design that went into these things .... lovely case/chassis.

But are they still of any real use ?

I'd have _thought_ the memory upgradeability to 16GB via cheap 2GB DDR2 might make it good for stuff where memory size (rather than CPU) is the factor/bottleneck - and you're looking for "on-the-cheap". Photoshop mebbe ? Logic ? .... and a 3-4 year-old version with Moto binaries does everything you need ....

Mebbe I'm just suffering from "lovely engineering - can't bear to throw it out" syndrome

Suppose I'll mess with it for a while - then mebbe its just about worth ebaying ?

mini-mad wrote: .. or hack it to death and put a pc inside of it

Yeah well - that'd be some hack to persuade ATX mobo and PSU into that case. Bet someone, somewhere's done it though

Just had a look - seems like Adobe suite up to CS4 runs on Moto - and Logic Pro 9 (earlier revisions) can run as well ....

.... and there's still room to keep a few chickens in there too.

Not the same without 8 DIMM slots though is it ?

Suppose some of that space could be used to fit a drive cage for RAID array etc.

These days I just like small/simple/basic/low power consumption.
Gone are the days when I had a full tower on the desk with multiple SCSI busses, 5 hard drives, loadsa optical, MO and tape drives etc. etc. Damn thing sounded like a 747 taking off when switched on

slaz wrote: kevinmcdonough wrote: (Haha and btw, I actually prefer PC's not a mac fanboy at all and not wanting to dig up that argument! ) Oh good Not really a Mac user myself either .... no doubt there are some good things about Macs (and MacOS). This G5 machine reminded me of the time - many moons ago - I was looking at the Apple website reading a long, defensive, load of stuff about how superior the G5 chips were cf the Intel chips - loadsa guff about pipelines and cache etc. ... plenty benchmark test graphs etc. .... and thinking Hmmmmm ..... Then a few months later Apple changed over to Intel CPUs ...... AND it transpired that Apple had been developing MacOS X on Intel (in parallel, in secret) for YEARS

Haha

yeah that was typical Apple all though the Steve Jobs era. Whatever they say they are not doing, they're almost always developing in secret. Then when they release it, they always try and find some tiny technical point so they can say that they haven't just copied all their competitors, they've done something "different" and better than the rest.

k

Non-intel Macs are pretty much useless, no current software will run on them, unless you want an old skool very stable pro-tools rig (Macs are junk now they are intel, hnece pro-tools is now PC not mac) I Have a couple of G5s to shift, but TBH I don't expect they will get much.