Power Mac G4 Cube

[bizzle]

Got this today from a coworker, 450 mhz Cube with some tiny amount of RAM and 20GB hard drive, DVD-ROM and Airport. Popped in 1.5GB RAM, 120GB hard drive, ATi 7500 32MB and loaded 10.5.8, 10.4.11, 10.2.8 and 9.2.2 on four partitions. Came with a clean Apple Pro Keyboard and Mouse (of the black variety) and a 22" Cinema Display ADC ($3999 in 2000!!!!). The only thing missing is speakers but oh well. I put a Radeon 9000 in my MDD so I can use the display on that and the Cube will just use some random Sony LCD.

All for the low low price of FREE!

 

[Hrududu]

Sweet deal. I had to pay for my Cube lol. What do you think about the 22" display? I've got a 17" Studio LCD and the 23" HD Cinema, but I haven't seen a 22" in years and don't remember the picture quality.

 

[bizzle]

For a 10 year old LCD it's not bad. It's massive and the resolution isn't as high as I'd wish for such a massive panel, but it's not bad.

 

[Bunsen]

Nice score!

I'm using the 22" ADC right now (also free). 1600x1024 is nothing to sneeze at, and the clarity is excellent.

 

[bizzle]

The display definitely is not bad. It's just funny my 17" MacBook Pro's display is higher resolution.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Wow, very very cool. Congrats!

 

[bizzle]

Anyway, I am using the display with my MDD and the cube is basically um, just something to look at. It's too slow to be useful anymore. I was running geekbench on it and it just shut off so it may have issus anyway. Strange though, I had it running for hours before I brought it home. If I do anything with it it'll be a silent web server running FreeBSD.

 

[beachycove]

A G4 Cube is like any other piece of vintage hardware: run the right software on it and it does its job well, but run the wrong software on it and it becomes a bottleneck.

A Cube is, for example, really, really fast running 9.1 (which is what it shipped with). The highest system it will run at all comfortably is X.4 (under which it is definitely best with 1.5GB RAM, a fan for ventilation, and a better video card than stock).

You get a good sense of what it is capable of from a standard office package. It struggles running MS Office 2008 (which runs, but rather like, say, Office 2001 does on a 6100). Running Office 2004, however, a Cube just flies.

So the moral of the story is, pop in a couple of very modest upgrades, drop a few million lines of code, and it will run smooth as silk.

 

[Bunsen]

Also, if you're in there doing any other upgrades, it's probably worth renewing the heatsink goop.

 

[zerotypeq]

This cube is running very well with FreeBSD on it atm and thanks for the login stuff bizzle.

 

[bizzle]

It's actually running Debian. I put the stock video card back in because it's much cooler too. I am just using it as a web server now.