Power Mac G5 – Technical Specifications (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Power Mac G5 – Technical Specifications (2003)

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41 pointsbwasti40 comments

I love how many of those machines are still around and still in use today. Low End Mac, for example, has a thriving user base, and there are still other groups about maintaining vintage Macs. Unfortunately, the price on a lot of the older machines has gone way up, as people try to capitalize on the vintage trend. I have a G4/800 iMac (the lamp one) that I still use, with Mac OS 9.2 on it.

My girlfriend got so mad at me when I mentioned the idea of picking one up. She understands why I like what I do, but she couldn't understand my interest in maintaining and toying with an older machine.

To be fair— we do live in an apartment that's a little small for us right now...

Think about all the extra room room you'd have for old computers if you didn't have said girlfriend.

That's why I'm single and have a lot of old computers. Not sure if they're related though.

I'm happily married and have a lot of old computers, games console and even an arcade machine. If you're spending the rest of your life with someone it helps to find someone with common interests. :)

I think you answered your own question.

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Another reason to pass on these, they suck quite a bit of power and will heat a small room.

Might I suggest the much-smaller G4 Cube, in that case?

http://lowendmac.com/2000/power-mac-g4-cube/

Those were pretty expensive last I looked. It has a lot of history as a continuation of Jobs' next cube idea. But it was expensive, sold poorly, and was prone to thermal and case damage (at least some things haven't changed...).

They’re very sought after, yeah. Probably a combination of the design itself and heavy pop culture exposure — at one time you’d have a hard time finding a TV show or movie where a G4 Cube didn’t make a cameo.

I was one of the people who purchased a G4 Cube when it came out. It was a lovely computer.

Totally I had a power mac G5 i was using as a vpn, vnc server, and for some random legacy software up until last year. Eventually replaced it (sold it 10 years later, crazy!) for the poor power efficiency but thats not the machines fault it was rock solid for years and years and probably still would be.

There is one on Craigslist locally for $35 in working condition. Free Brother laser printer sans toner, included.

It's not cheap, but for those who like the aesthetics of the Powermac G5 tower, there is a conversion kit to put a normal ATX motherboard in it, and a standard PC power supply:

https://www.thelaserhive.com/product/g5-atx-kit-psu-holder/

Makes it pretty easy to choose a new motherboard such as for a Ryzen 2700, with fast M.2 NVME SSD, etc.

I'd love to get this kit and convert the G5 tower into a Hackintosh.

Debian can be installed on G5 (although the latest stable Debian 9 "Stretch" isn't supported, what you can do is install Debian 8 "Jessie" or the unstable branch "Sid") [1].

Also note the PPC 750 and PPC 7400, used in the Mac G3 and G4 computers, are NOT affected by meltdown & spectre, so if you want a secure desktop, try Debian on G4 [2].

[1] https://wiki.powerprogress.org/Debian_PPC_Starters_Manual [2] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/computers-unaffected-meltdown-...

I don’t have any PowerPC machines going any more. But for those who do, it seems that a modern web browser might still be an option: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

TenFourFox is one of the more impressive pieces of software I've seen. It has its own JIT and accelerated codecs and recently, a toolbox of handy features beyond what Firefox ESR provides as well. It's able to run modern JavaScript applications, very slowly, on my original 300Mhz iBook G3, a computer that's nineteen (!) years old. I hope it sticks around a bit longer yet.

I admire your fortitude. The slowest system I routinely use is a 1GHz iMac G4 (TenFourFox is the browser, natch). Now, that is a lovely machine. The form factor has never been equaled, and the springs in the arm are still going great.

The JIT does work on G3, but unfortunately you won't get much benefit from the accelerated codecs as there's no AltiVec. But, at least the G3 version has compiler tuning.

Just watch out for the creator, he's a bit of a jerk.

We were still running tenfourfox a few years ago, but modern (i.e. complex) web pages became just too hungry for this CPU. Facebook was getting fairly painful to use on there.

Try loading the mobile versions of web pages. Facebook for example has a super-low-end non-JS version of the site at https://m.facebook.com/

Kind of depressing what the web has become in recent years when you think about it.

I just happened to buy a Dual 1.8Ghz model for $10 CAD at a garage sale yesterday. Beautiful machine. Also had a keyboard, but unfortunately isn't a mechanical one (rubber domes over membrane.)

I sold Apple stock to my my Power Mac G5 in 2003. Now it sits on the floor under my desk to remind me of how much it cost in 2003 Apple stock :-)

G5, the first 64bit desktop mac. [1]

Another fun fact, I named the Apache Velocity project after the 'velocity engine' in that chip.

[1] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/faq/powermac-...

This was an awesome machine with a great architecture, but unfortunately it didn't have legs [1] for the long run. The G5 processor architecture was in the end too power hungry, especially for the laptop space - with the fabled "PowerBook G5" never arriving.

[1] https://janit.iki.fi/shit/3Ghz.m4a

We're still waiting for the 3GHz G5 Steve promised at that keynote "in 12 months"...

Much of the failure to get it into PowerBooks is probably attributable to the same issue as the mythical 3GHz models - IBM's struggle to die-shrink the things.

> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/apple_g5_promise/

I'm not sure the G5 would have ever made it in a laptop even if they did get the die size down. POWER4 is just big and hungry. It was big and hungry in the server space, and it was big and hungry in the workstation space. It just wasn't designed for the constraints of a mobile implementation.

The rumour I heard at the time, which I believe, is that PA Semi was actually in the running for the "next" PowerBook line based on some evolution of the PWRficient PA6T. Then Apple went Intel and bought them out later, so we'll probably never know.

Power Mac G5 (Late 2004)

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP67

Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) "Quad Core" (2.5)

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP37

I have a single-core model from 2003 that I pulled from a trash heap. I still use it for scanning film and anything else that Adobe CS2 can handle. I also have a OS X tiger partition to run classic applications on. Great computer/space-heater ;)

I have the dual G5 2GHz standard model and it's still kickin'! Sure, the clock battery is way beyond its lifetime. But with a modern Linux distro and ntp it's a minor setback.

I only just retired my '03 dual-2GHz G5 at the end of last year, and only because of space constraints in my current house. It was and still is a great piece of equipment.

Ubuntu Mate 1604 Powerpc, works perfectly on the G5.

I once worked for three months to get a used Power Mac G5 from a company. Totally glad I've done so

And it runs Jagwire!

...man, I miss Steve Jobs keynotes.

So what's next? This.

https://youtu.be/24jKGoA9IVw?t=703

Had to find it :-)

Is there a particular reason for the specs to be submitted today that I might be missing?

Most of the pre-Intel era systems are still functional. In contrast, since 2007 I burned through 4! MacBooks, 3 of them were Pro with failing Nvidia graphics. The G5 systems were the last very good engineered Apple computers at the time, although I do recall problems with them either. The liquid cooled quad G5 with corrosion disease... ah, what a time!

Something to do with the 2018 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)? Maybe to get people to blindly click on it expecting a new Power Mac has been released.

See how far we've come in 15 years I guess?

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