Powermac G5 (7,2) upgrades

[Dimitris1980]

Greetings,

i bought a Powermac G5 (7,2) dual 2 ghz, 4gb ram with no hard drives. My purpose is to use it for games along with my Motorola, PPC 601, G3 and G4 systems. I have the following questions because i don't know much about G5s.

1. Which are the best video cards for this machine?
2. I found that the machine takes Sata I hard drives. Can Sata II hard drive be installed, install operating system and boot? I found one Seagate Barracuda 250gb 3gb/s.
3. OWC has ssd including the kits. Is it better to install this than a Sata Hard drive? Can i install operating system and boot from SSD?
4. I want to install Mac OS Tiger for Mac OS X games and classic games (Mac OS 9 and below). How compatible is the classic mode application on Tiger and G5?
5. I want to install Mac OS Leopard for internet. Which is the best browser for this machine and what can i do on internet with this? Can i watch youtube videos or use the social media like facebook?
6. Whatever you want to suggest for this machine i am open to anything, thank you in advance for your time to help me with your knowlegde.

Best Regards
Dimitris from Greece

 

[Daniël]

To answer some of your questions:

1. The best is a flashed NVIDIA 7800GS, you can find a ROM to flash PC cards with on The Mac Elite, as well as buying guides. The best ATi card would be an X800XT or X850XT, again flashable with a ROM found there. Do note that these cards can fetch a premium.
2. Generally hard drives are problem free, despite SATA versions, it's newer SATA SSDs that don't always work well.
3. You can install an SSD, but the old SATA chipset does mean it needs decent backwards compatibility with the old SATA standards. If you can find out what SSD controller an SSD has, you can often find datasheets or specsheets that list the SATA compatibility of the controller.
4. It depends from app to app. Classic games might or might not work, you're going to have to try, or look up if anyone has described compatibility for a game in Classic mode, and maybe things to do to get it to work (better).
5. You could go to those sites on a G5, but it will be thoroughly unpleasant. The modern web uses standards that came long after the death of PowerPC in the Mac, as well as being far more resource intensive. Browsers for PowerPC Macs these days also just can't keep up with the modern web, given they have hobbyist programmers work on them in their free time. TenFourFox just recently had active development cancelled, moving it into hobby mode. Others are now working on forks, but the modern web just outpaces whatever they can do by miles.
6. Just have fun playing with contemporary apps and games on the system, and don't consider using it as daily driver computer, I'd say.

 

[Dimitris1980]

Thank you for your answer. I found a Sata II hard drive from a guy near me. When i take it, i will connect it and install Mac OS. Then i will see which video card is installed and i will proceed with my project accordingly.