23" Apple Cinema Display, 2x250 SATA & Oh, one more thing

[beachycove]

In preparation for a pending switch to a G5 at work (the family is getting the high-end 24" iMac that I current use there, which is 1. owned by me, and 2. hugely overpowered for what I use it for, plus all my software for the next couple of years probably will be PPC-based or Universal), I just picked up a used 23" aluminum display to partner the G5. $399 made the cost of the display a bit steep, but the screen is definitely among the most important parts of any computer, I wanted "the look," and the price is more than competitive with typical eBay prices for Apple Cinema Displays — on top of which comes the ouch-factor of shipping. It cleaned up to be pristine, and came with a somewhat battered but otherwise intact shipping box.

I also ordered the G5 on eBay yesterday — on the advice of a fellow member, I settled for a mid-range dual 2.0GHz PCI-X. It is as yet bare-bones and untested, but for $125 I can't have gone too far wrong.

As it is a bare-bones G5, I also acquired over the weekend a pair of barely-used 250GB WD SATA drives for the G5, which I will set up either in some sort of RAID, or else with applications on one and the user account on the other, just to keep things nice, clean and fast.

Now to get 4GB of PC3200 RAM.... No need for anything more, and anyway, as old desktop RAM goes, that stuff is surprisingly expensive!

 

[Unknown_K]

Who made PCI-X video cards for the G5?

 

[bizzle]

No one as far as I know. The PCI-X models had an 8x AGP Pro slot for graphics.

 

[Gorgonops]

A slight "ouch" on the $399 Cinema Display. I use a pair of them on my office machine (An early 2007 Mac Pro) and I haven't been overly impressed. They have good-quality 24 bit LCDs which certainly beat the wishy-washy unevenly-lit 18 bit screens you'll find in a $150 Acer or whatnot, but with the pair of them I've been put off by several issues:

1: The stand attached to it looks pretty, but it has no height adjustment. Furthermore, one or both of the monitors I have is crooked with the edge of one sitting almost a quarter inch higher than the one next to it when they're put side by side. The only way to "fix" it is to pile some business cards under the edge of one of the monitors' stand to make a shim, and doing that creates its own problems. I know Apple *has* to make everything "pretty", but thanks to a form-over-function design and poor quality control the end result here is a stand functionally inferior to the one included with all but the very cheapest competing monitors. (And of course if you want another stand for functional or ergonomic reasons you have to buy an adapter plate, since it would of been design heresy to put VESA mounting holes directly on the monitor.)

2: On both of them I *swear* I can see the florescent backlight flickering out of the corner of my eye. The only time I've seen that before is on really cheap/really old laptops. It comes and goes, perhaps it's powerline noise making it through insufficient filtering in the power supplies?

Of course, you didn't say what vintage 23" display you bought. Apple constantly makes subtle feature changes in the line, perhaps your will be from a better batch.