Uses for G5 Mac Tower?

[BlackMonk]

My college is selling off Mac G5 towers for $175.  Is there anything cool I could do with one or two of them?  Specificly, are there any OSs that I can install onto them?

http://www.lowendmac.com/deals/best-power-mac-g5-prices.html

There's some prices from around the 'net along with a rating for reliability.  Even the cheapest is $100 more than what you're lookin' at.  If anything, you may be able to look on eBay or Craigslist and see if you can resell them at a profit if that's your thing.

[BlackMonk]

Leopard (10.5) SUCKS on a G5 - avoid at all costs. All the software fixes and patches released (called Snow Leopard) do not work on a PowerMac    

I don't understand this at all.  Leopard runs fine on my 1.25 GHz G4 with 1.75 GB of RAM.  How does it run worse on what would undoubtably be better hardware?  I mean, you have a better memory subsystem, automatically it'll have a better video card, and I think all models support SATA which will give a little boost over older models that sport only IDE.

Snow Leopard (10.6) isn't really "software fixes and patches".  That's what 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, etc. are.  10.5.8 was released in August of 2009 so it's not like 10.5 is an abandoned platform.  Certainly Tiger (10.4) is far closer to being on its way out from mainstream support for Apple.  And 10.5 was when Apple pretty much solidified their APIs--before then, 10.4, 10.3, 10.2, that stuff was in flux so programs written for one version of the OS might not work on a later one.  I'd think 10.5 would be a better bet in that regard.

10.6 is smaller because Apple ditched the "fat" binaries and PPC support.  There's some multi-core performance tweaking, too, which I suppose would have been useful to a quad-core G5 but probably not much of a gain for dual-core G5's and G4's.  10.6 is not a "fix" of 10.5.  The many updates and patches for 10.5 are.  10.6 is more of a performance and finetuning update.

Maybe you had bad luck with 10.5 on your G5, I dunno.  But I haven't really seen much backlash about Leopard on that platform and just wanted to clarify lest other people reading this think that 10.5 is completely buggered on the G5 platform.  

[BlackMonk]

Watch out for the faster 2.5 and 2.7GHz units, they are water cooled and there's a long history of then leaking and failing.

More on the water-cooled issues:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_coolant_leaks.html


And more G5 info in case anyone's curious:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems.html#g5

[BlackMonk]

I like that idea, maybe only 2, or 3 G5 PowerMacs would be enough for the team to share in working on getting MorphOS to work on and take advantage of the G5 in the PowerMac.  If MorphOS could take advantage of all of the G5 CPU's improvements over the G4 would be great and if the team could also make some kind of dual core implementation, any kind, even if it was not the most ideal implementation where the OS itself was multithreaded and it was only set up to run certain applications on the second core where developers could write their new MorphOS apps to use the second core on a dual core system if detected, it would be better than not taking advantage of the second core at all.  Perhaps such an implementation could even be set up to allow the use of all 4 cores in PowerMac systems that have two dual core G5 CPUs (Quad core systems).

That is similar to how classic Mac OS did it for multicore.  So you could have a quad-CPU PPC604 system but the OS and most programs didn't recognize or use more than one CPU.  However, specific programs like Photoshop or specific Photoshop filters would be able to see and use the extra CPUs.

[BlackMonk]

Other than the typical, mostly tongue in cheek Apple bashing, I don't know why anyone into computers wouldn't want one of these at this price.

That's what I don't get, either.  People here like nonstandard hardware and are fans of PowerPC.  The G5/PPC970 was the last "nonstandard" Apple made and had a PowerPC to boot!  It had a neat CPU interface that ran at half the CPU speed, the CPU itself was technically advanced (or at least relevent at the time), the case is neat, and you can use modern stuff like hard drives, USB, and ethernet.  I mean, good times!

I'd love to get one just to play with but $175 plus shipping (were anyone to be willing to buy one for me) from... Brigham Young University? would equal out to an unhappy wife.  She supports me getting old funky hardware but having just had to outfit two vehicles with full new sets of tires, the timing just ain't right.