Uses for G5 Mac Tower?

[ElPolloDiabl]

Unless AmigaOS or MorphOS was going to be ported to it there is no point. Spend your money elsewhere. Get a nice AROS rig set up.

[Crisisdog]

It's hard to justify the purchase of a PowerPC Mac, unless you're short on money and really want to kinda get familiar with OS X.  You can load your flavor of choice PowerPC Linux also and turn it into a server or something, but unfortunately Apple is killing OS X support for the PowerPC series very quickly.  Aperature 3 is now Intel only and even Garage Band was limited in some features upon it's release a year ago.  Leopard updates are only critical security releases at this point.

As for Leopard running slow on a PowerMac G5, I have to disagree.  I've had it running on a dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 without any noticeable slowness issues.  I will say that the single processor units were slow as hell in general though, our advertising department just got rid of theirs and I'm very thankful that I no longer have to support them.

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.

[Matt_H]

For $175 I'd say it's worth grabbing one in the off chance that AmigaOS/MorphOS does eventually run on it (depending on where it is in the G5 line). In the meantime, there's OSX, and if you do eventually get sick of it, it'll probably hold its value so you won't be out much in the end.

[Tron2k2]

I'm on a 1.5Ghz single G4 in an upgraded Sawtooth.  It does have a hacked 256MB nVidia GForce 6200 graphics card and SATA card/drives so it's pretty snappy.  But it's still on a 100MHz bus.  So even a single 1.8Ghz G5 with the slower 600MHz bus would be a big step up for me-I'd throw down $175 in a heartbeat!

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.  Maybe we should all chip in and buy several to send to the MorphOS developer crew ;-)

[amigadave]

I'm on a 1.5Ghz single G4 in an upgraded Sawtooth.  It does have a hacked 256MB nVidia GForce 6200 graphics card and SATA card/drives so it's pretty snappy.  But it's still on a 100MHz bus.  So even a single 1.8Ghz G5 with the slower 600MHz bus would be a big step up for me-I'd throw down $175 in a heartbeat!

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.  Maybe we should all chip in and buy several to send to the MorphOS developer crew ;-)

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).

[iCreate]

Use it as a media server, web server, database server or backup.

[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.

[Dr_Righteous]

Door STop? :lol:

[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.