NG X5000 Advice

[cgutjahr]

what are you thoughts?  Good/Bad?  Worth the money?

You're asking the wrong question. The first question you should ask yourself is: "What do I want to do with it"? An Amiga and an AmigaOne are two totally different beasts.

An Amiga is very slow, adding a graphics card is insanely expensive (and not really needed these days) and they're totally useless for today's computing tasks. Plus, the hardware might need some love before you can actually use it (recapping, removing batteries...). But depending on which model you buy, it's a cool reminder of days gone by, a collectible, the hardware project you always wanted to do or simply hardware porn. You can 'use' it to play old games, watch demos, try old applications you could never get your hands on back then or build a 1989 setup that can do DTP 1989 style and receive weather broadcasts via CB radio. Or you can spend hours finetuning Workbench to your liking.

An AmigaOne is relatively slow - yes, even the latest models - and insanely expensive. It can be used for about 15%  (totally made that number up right now) of today's computing tasks - if you're a masochist. But you'll own a computer of which only a few hundred units were build, not thousands or even millions - so: definitely hardware porn. It doesn't really run old games or demos, but it runs Linux game ports and some old applications, plus a bunch of new ones. And the Workbench - or rather the entire OS - is miles better than the older versions, i.e. finetuning it should be even more fun if that's your thing.

IMHO: if you think about what you want it for, it will become clear what you should buy. Plus, as somebody already mentioned: both platforms can be tried out via emulation for a low price, you might want to give that a try before spending thousands of dollars.

[cgutjahr]

I wonder what those who complain about the X5000 being 'slow' actually want to do with the machine?

I didn't complain, I simply stated a fact: X5000 = slow. Somebody asking for advice on a 2300 Euro purchase deserves some honest advice, no?

You don't mind slow? You don't use it to do anything useful so you never notice it's slow? You're so old you don't see the difference between FullHD and a 320x200 video? You never browse the web so you don't witness the single core machine that doesn't have a decent Javascript interpreter slow down to a crawl? Fine by me - I'm happy for you. But don't get all worked up because I call it 'slow'.

The power of the average PC/CPU is generally wasted nowadays.

The last time we got somewhat reliable, independent benchmarks, there was an Mplayer benchmark (decoding a h264 stream) where the MorphOS machine spent 0.6 seconds waiting for system I/O, while the OS4 machine spent nearly 1200% of that time waiting for system I/O. That's what I call wasting CPU cycles. Granted, that was back in 2012 - but OS4 and drivers aren't exactly a success story.

and even in these examples many tasks are offloaded to the GPU nowadays

Not on OS4.