I don't think it will ever feel "Pentium 4 bad" -- most people were disappointed with P4s right from the getgo and it was a few years where it straightforwardly made sense to go with AMD instead.
The real trouble is going to be the hard disk and the 1 gig of RAM. That machine might run 6 or 8, but whether or not it's worth the effort to do that.
These things do have a discrete graphics processor, the Radeon 2400 and 2600 were never known as speed demons.
Even with, 4-8 gigs of RAM and an SSD, it'll be slow enough that doing things the way people expect them to be done today coudl be challenging. It'll run Word on Windows just fine, but if you were to put it in front of a child, they'd go to docs.google.com and then look at you while it loaded.
Then again I only have 1 Intel Mac in my collection (original Intel IMac) and it collects dust, the G5's and earlier are more fun.
This is super interesting. I've been predicting for a few years that people who were super-gung-ho into Power Macintosh and iMac G5 stuff would eventually move on, by way of... early intel-based Mac stuff is now ten years old and nearly free, as we can see in this very thread.
The people who are into it for the sake of having a $60 computer, even if that computer feels like...
a $60 computer that can't even dream of keeping up with modern netbooks are now moving onto Intel systems. So, none of this is surprising. There's a group on here (regardless of whether or not I think it's a good idea) who is doing this because basically for cheap thrills.
Going back to G5 vs. Intel. What about G5 makes it more fun, and when you talk about your collection, are you comparing Power Macintoshes to iMacs or iMacs on both sides, or what?
I'm a little suspicious of the idea that an ("any") iMac G5 is more than than an intel iMac. Both are generic home computers from the mid 2000s that no longer run the most recent versions of Mac OS X. Both have some alternative, more modern software options available. Although both are premium within their time, neither are the things I know you classically like.
Anyway perhaps I read that wrong, my apologies if so. It just seems weird that there's some measure of fun you can get out of a G5 that you can't out of an iMac, when other than in performance (at which the iMac will win, despite itself being ho-hum) they are nearly identical as computers.
Other than that, there's nothing super surprising here. Someone picked up a decade-old computer that's just barely on this side of death for real cheap and, as 10-year-old computers have almost always done, will face complications and performance trouble when it comes to using it.
A 10 year old system will probably feel too new to try to isolate and use as though it is a vintage computer that needs to be treated specially.
