What to do with a Power Mac G5?

[agg23]

I have a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz that is just sitting around. I don't really know what to do with it. I've tried running it as a server, but the network transfer speeds were much to slow (HD maybe?). What would you suggest?

[gobabushka]

Donate it to me

[uniserver]

you can try installing a new hard drive, what are your speeds, because SATA1 pretty much the best you are going to get is around 65 Megabytes/sec.
you should be getting Atleast 50 mb/sec, there should be a seagate hard drive in there, usually those are pretty fast. also make sure its not the network cable from the the Compute to the router, and make sure its Cat5e, i've had crap cables slow my 1000 m/bit speeds down greatly!

[agg23]

I don't really want to spend any money on it. I'm more interested in what kind of desktop uses it would have.

[uniserver]

what programs have you already tried with it?

[agg23]

What do you mean???

[beachycove]

I think that if I had one of the single processor G5 machines with case parts in good condition, I'd look for suitably bashed higher-end model (for no more than a small sum, mind you) and proceed to swap some parts to make one really good machine out of the two. The case itself disassembles so that even the grill front and back/ top and bottom part can be swapped between machines.

Now, I will admit that I am a luddite, and that the Intel machines have advantages for the web and certain media applications etc., but for almost all of my everyday uses, a G5 has plenty of power and performs with dollops of panache. My own favourite is the dual 2.3GHz, early 2005 model — the pick of the G5 litter.

[dudejediknight]

Donate it to me

That was my first thought as well.



Probably the first thing would be to add more RAM if it's not maxed out already. Then maybe a faster HD like the others have said.

Not familiar with the G5s per se, but getting a faster single-core processor or even a mulit-core setup would probably give it gobs of raw horsepower if you wanted to do more heavy-duty things with it. Swapping in a faster processor would that probably be the most expensive option, but it would probably net the biggest boost. Though it would probably be overkill for a light duty daily-use machine, since any sort of G5 wouldn't be a painfully slow and obsolete machine to start with.

I'd certainly be more than happy to have such a huge step up from what passes as usable around here. My parents are still making good use of a 1.25Ghz G4 iMac for daily use for email, light browsing, and occasionally watching some YouTube videos, and it'd certainly be a big improvement over my workhorse 450mhz G3 Blue & White that does just about everything I've ever asked of it. Unless there's something that makes you absolutely need an MacIntel with the most recent version of OSX, a G5 would certainly be a reasonable machine to have and to put to use.

[uniserver]

swapping cpu on the G5's is not as straight forward as it might seem,

just get some ddr ram for it, throw in a couple 1gb sticks,

get a decent seagate hd, 7200 rpm,

install leopard,

i think should be a fine machine for many good tasks.

[agg23]

Are their no specialized tasks you'd recommend? I'm not one who can daily work with such old machines. I pretty much have to use equipment within ~3 years old for it to be useful.

[Cory5412]

G5s (and most G4s) are in a really interesting place. They're not really "retro" -- they're definitely somewhat proprietary, and compared to the Macs we've got today, they're odd, finnicky old beasts with limited hardware support, etc. I would be zero surprised in a few years to find that people are comparing the likes of PowerMac and iMac G5s to SiliconGraphics and Sun MIPS/SPARC workstations. Useful in their day, but didn't keep very well and had a fairly limited shelf life after their vendors stopped actively supporting them. (Maybe HP/HPPA or DecPaq/Alpha is a better example than Sun here, because I hear one or more of the BSDs has very active sun/sparc support.)

All of that having been said, if I had a G5, I'd probably use it for much of what I would have done the day it was new in 2003 -- as little Internet as possible, minus maybe an IRC client or an ssh/telnet session, and period-appropriate productivity and graphics or media apps.

At this point, programming for those older versions of 10.x would only really be useful as an exercise in patience, and if you're really intent on porting. (ClassicHasClass may be the best resource for what to do to get started with programming for old versions of Mac OS X. I know that 10.3/10.4 had xcode in the box, starting with 10.5 it may or may not have been on the install CD, but I'm also sure xcode is available on Apple's web site.)

Other than that, I would keep it around. If it's not broken now, it won't be any time soon. The bad caps issue really affected the eMac and one or two models of the iMac G5 the most significantly, so a G5 would be worth cracking open every few years to check on, but probably won't be wildly leaky.

The unfortunate thing is that unless you're running a pretty specific floating-point heavy workload, a G4 or almost any modern Intel computer (Prescott Pentium 4 and newer, Atom, maybe even Pentium M) will outrun it, numbers-wise, and finding updated software for Mac OS X 10.6/10.7 on Intel and Windows/Linux on x86 is way more easy than it is on Mac OS X/PPC. Additionally, a machine with an atom in it will take a tenth (probably less) the electricity that a G5 does, while still being faster and having more/faster interconnects. (There are atom boards available with six SATA-3G/6G ports, and multiple PCI/PCIe ports for additional HBAs, if you're really interested in having a server with any big amount of storage capacity.)

That having been said. The G5 is fairly recent and because it's a Mac, a whole bunch of commercial software was available for it in its day. What can't you do with a G5? Technically, a G5 could do everything I do on my current computer. It would be slower and I would arguably be wasting electricity, but it could be fun, and ram/disks are so cheap, if you're running less than 4 or so gigs of ram and there's any indication your disks might not be performing well, the cost of more ram and new disks would make it worthwhile. (I suspect with 4 gigs of ram, and a new disk or two, 10.4 or 10.5 would run pretty well on a G5, and may even be useful, but it depends on your workload and patience.)

Another thought: Is there anything you want to do with a G5? There are a few of us around who might remember what app people would've grabbed back when G5s were new to accomplish that task.

[uniserver]

wow 29 bucks! free shipping,
http://www.ascendtech.us/foxconn-45ctp- ... p330s.aspx

all that ATOM talk, and a google search...
these will run up to snow leopard and are 100% supported,
even the GMA 950 it's fully CI AND QE supported!

[ClassicHasClass]

A 1.6GHz isn't going to be much faster than a top-end MDD and has much less hardware and OS support, unfortunately.

I use a G5 as my daily driver and main development workstation, but I have a quad 2.5GHz and even by today's standards is still no slouch. Either the quad or the fastest air-cooled (I think that's beachycove's) would be my recommendation; the quad is the only liquid cooled G5 that's worth the headache. I would have trouble thinking of stuff to do with a 1.6GHz too, unfortunately. It's not a terrible Mac, just sort of an odd duck in that it was not significantly faster than the machines it replaced and had more drawbacks.

For programming, Xcode came with 10.4 and you can get 2.5 easily enough (I don't think Apple has expunged it from their servers yet like they did MPW). I build TenFourFox with Xcode 2.5 and the Xcode 3 linker which one of our contributors ported to 10.4.

[Unknown_K]

Honestly if you can't think of anything you need to do with it then you have two choices, sell it for what you can get (very little) or shelve it for a couple years until you get the urge to revisit it.

In the 90's I kept a few of my old 486/Pentium 1 boards (since they were not worth anything) on a shelf incase I ever wanted to use them for something. It took a decade or so but I eventually wanted to go back to that era and the parts came in handy. With all hardware the value of the stuff drops down to nothing but after a while they do get harder and more expensive to replace. In a few year anything non x86 is going to be hard to find with all the recycling going on. If you happen to be one of those people who likes revisiting old computers then keeping a G5 around might be a good idea.

[agg23]

wow 29 bucks! free shipping,
http://www.ascendtech.us/foxconn-45ctp- ... p330s.aspx

NICE!!! Makes me want to get back into hackintoshing...

Off topic, but... Why is there no quote button? It's driving me crazy.

[Cory5412]

In terms of G5s, classichasclass is pretty much correct. the 1.6GHz G5 isn't going to be very fast. The main reasons to use one are "I'm testing it" or "it was free and I had it hanging around."

Atoms aren't that great for Mac OS X, if you want to build a new Mac using non-Apple parts, it's my "you didn't hear it here" reccomendation that you get something with a Core2 processor and a 965 or 3-series chipset. Any Core2 will make the G5 cry for its mother, and if you're going OS X, it's a reasonable presumption that you're wanting something at least semi-modern anyway.

An Atom will be suitable if you're looking only for low power consumption or you're looking for linux/bsd, or a toy OS like reactos or haiku.

Why is there no quote button?

It was removed due to pretty extreme abuse. We tried asking, we tried asking again, we tried asking again, ad nauseum, until it was easier to make one of the tools away. Sad but true.

I would agree with Unknown_K's assessment that when you've got a system in the "zone of uninteresting" the best strategies are either to sell it for what you can get (maybe to somebody who still really relies on that particular hardware for whatever reason, and is willing to pay for even the slowest machine) or shelve it until it's more interesting from an actual historic standpoint.

[Bunsen]

Why is there no quote button?

Also, you really should have read this some time in the three years since you joined:

68kMLA House Style

Also, a little note about "house style" on the MLA - we discourage excess quoting as it tends to make threads cluttered and unreadable. Although most of our members browse here with modern machines, being a vintage computing community, we still aim to keep the forums readable on slower and small-screen devices. Please keep quoting to a minimum.

Please don't quote the post directly behind yours, unless you need to extract a small part of a long post and reply specifically to that. If you are responding to an earlier post in thread, please quote only the relevant part to which you are responding, rather than the entire post. If you are quoting from another thread, the same applies, and in addition please provide a link to the relevant thread & post. The link to a specific post is the small "document" icon in the top left of each post.

[waynestewart]

I've got the same problem with a dual 2.5. It was given to me because it was overheating and Apple couldn't solve the problem. Sat there for about a year before I looked at it. Blew out a lot of dust and it was no longer overheating even when rendering video. But what to do with it now? It's too noisy to run videos on my TV. I now have 3 Macbook Pros and a Macbook as well as a couple of overclocked 1.42 MDDs and a dual 1.8ghz DA. I just can't think of anything that I couldn't do as well or better on one of these.

[Cory5412]

The case for keeping such a machine around definitely diminishes when you've got a bunch of faster MacBook/Pros around and you have no specific need for a G5 or for an older version of the OS.

A dual 2.5 G5 is probably faster than most of the G4s, and will hold more ram, but there's a good possibility that most software that'll run in 10.4/10.5 won't take advantage of the G5's specific type of extra horsepower, without being faster still on an Intel computer.

[beachycove]

This discussion is just a little nauseating for this site — 68kmla my ass. Thus, please excuse the following rant.

The truth is that the switch to Intel and associated developments in the land of software (Wirth's Law, Flash, and the relentless onward march—but to where?—of the web in general) have made G5 towers redundant in the popular imagination, which has the knock-on effect of making them cheap, plentiful and (in practical terms) perfectly collectable for the rest of us. To that extent, the state of the G5 presents a welcome opportunity.

The machines are, in a nutshell, vintage by computer standards (much of which is a stitch-up and a con, but I'll not go there just yet). Now, in the land of vintage computers, which we are all on here to talk about, I prefer to use professional-grade hardware when I can (Quadra 950s over LC475s, for example). Among more recent machines, the G5 towers fit that particular description, rather better than, say, might an early MacBook. A single-processor G5 maybe doesn't, admittedly, but a 2.3GHz duallie certainly does. Unless I had compelling issues related to portability, therefore, I'd take such a G5 tower over an early MacBook any day, essentially because the former will outlive the latter, has dollups more class, and in that sense and more kicks early MacBook butt. Speed is frankly over-rated; so is wasting one's youth on Flash and online video. I prefer interesting engineering and design quality.

There is a workable solution to the conundrum that arises when perfectly good tools are being displaced by the ephemeral lure of having and holding ever-newer, faster ones — don't buy new if you can avoid it. Be a Luddite, resist the hype, maximize the astonishingly untapped potential of the older tools (e.g., by learning to program in a TenFour Fox kind of way, or by buying abandoned software for them — like, say, Logic for ppc, or learn to compile for OSX on a risk-free box) and so reuse what others discard, before—eventually, admittedly—you yourself have to recycle it. Run the right software on it (which is what really matters), and make the computer industry poorer, while keeping yourself richer in the bargain. You will lose out on almost nothing, apart from having been had.

A perfectly functional professional-grade computer tower ought to keep getting used as long as possible, like any $3000+ tool in a rightly-ordered world. In what other walk of life do we throw such tools away so readily? It would be seen as barking madness in, say, a woodworking shop, or even in a hospital, and it ought also be be taken as madness in our homes and on our desks. Yes, there comes a point when technologies need to be replaced, but there also comes a point at which the recognition should dawn that Lemming-like behaviours are endemic in the world of computer consumption and marketing, and that they are best resisted. Yup, that's us (you can still watch that in HTML5 on yer G5, BTW).

What to do with a G5 tower? Put it together with another one that has been abandoned, like I said, and make one better than both. Or in its current state, find someone else who can use it if you can't, even if it is only in order for them to experiment with OSX or Fedora (ported to PPC again) or with compiling, and thus give it away ("He who has two cloaks should give to him who has none"). That would really be something remarkable to do with a G5.

My $.02.

[ClassicHasClass]

by learning to program in a TenFour Fox kind of way

Writing the G5 TenFourFox backend taught me an awful lot about how to optimize for the chip, and actually applies pretty much to any later POWER system. I think I can say unequivocally that an awful lot of software was never well optimized for it.

But I know that defending the G5 is pretty much impossible around here.

[mac2geezer]

Well said, Beachycove.

[IIfx]

I guess what beachycove said is very true, many of us like to say oh the intel x is better blah

Apples hype is seductive.
The industrys march for more bandwith, more speed, more upgrades is nearly sickening.

My concern is the pace of evolution is getting way too fast. Instead of writing cleaner code, developers seem to just write more bloat expecting you to own the newest gadget.

i.e why keep your iPad 1 or Macbook for 4 years? Buy the iPad HD 5 WOW SUPER FAST NEW 3d 4g 5z 16Q version with Siri1.2b L56 with BookFace Intergration and TwitDerp telecasting.

If you dont, no Angry Birds SpaceSpaceUltraHD for you.

Why keep your iPhone for 2 years? Get the newer one with the wifies and the geebees.

-end minor rant mode-

This new massive-data transmission internet is horrible for a lot of people who live in areas where they cant get fast broadband. Who wants to wait 20 hours to download an OS update? (for example a 10.x.x update)

[Bunsen]

[mod-voice=ON]

uniserver, could you please stop spamming this and other threads with irrelevant casemods? And please, learn how image embedding works.

Thankyou.

[uniserver]

what is the best way to add an image i've been just using the upload attachment, and then hitting the img button and cut and paste the file name, is that not the best way?

Thanks!