What to do with an old G5?

well i was gifted an old phenom 2 tower. Im just going to put freenas on it and use it as a nas

Depends on the codec and GPU.

I stuffed in all the RAM I had laying around, 4GB should be enough I think, I doubt I'll find 8x 1GB DDR400 DIMMS, in matched pairs, for cheap

Same for the CPUs, these will be expensive as well. Too expensive for an old machine like this. Dual 2.5GHz would cost me over a 100 bucks incl. shipping.

I feel like tiger + gentoo dualboot would be the best option for now.

However what can I use this old tower for aside from space heater?

8x 512MB, matched pairs

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You can try using it as a dilator for your butthole

sell the guys, save the case
cut and drill to put a custom built pc in there
make the external buttons work somehow
dunno, could be a nice little diy project

guts*

Das rite mane.
Currently doing just that, found one on the trash and guttet it, case was jammed and scratched to oblivion so I spend quite a few hours on fixing it and now I'm doing a paintjob to make it look a bit nicer.
Tried to run it before gutting it but it was pretty much dead. I'll sell the parts on ebay, maybe someone needs that trash.

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That would be a waste, I love old hardware but it's just a shame that they're not going to be used. This computer is 15 years old, I used to have one about 8 years ago (2GHz variant) as my only computer and it worked fine. I can't believe that now, 8 years later, it's completelt useless.

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It was always an overheating piece of shit and one of the main reasons Apple switched to Intel.

I think you can buy a conversion kit to turn it into a standard ATX case. Probably involves dremel-ing though.

Wasn't it because IBM promised 3GHz but couldn't deliver in time? So they abandoned the future and became a mainstream computer vendor. Apple should've stayed with PowerPC.

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Install Gentoo or Debian or OpenBSD or NetBSD or anything else with decent PowerPC support and have fun with it.

I have no need to turn it into a generic piece of shit pc, I already got a thinkpad I can use for everything.

How come some have heat spreaders and some don't

Why would Apple use RAM heat spreaders anyway? I thought they were a meme.

Yup
I don't know the exact reasons why, I just know that the Intel baded Mac Mini that was released shortly after was performing bettrr overall without running as hot as the G5 and you could probably fit like 10 of them into a G5 case. Nothing could compete with Intel back then so Apple took the only logical move.

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This was random RAM I had laying around, the blue RAM comes from the P4 I had when I was a kid, I put blue heatspreaders on the ram, spraypainted the case metallic grey and put 230V Christmas lights inside the case.

However, the first Mac Pro had heatspreaders on its DDR2.

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you could mod the case for ATX motherboards. It's a fun project that's not too hard.

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Why not

1. I already have an empty (somewhat damaged) G5 case that is halfway modded, probably needs to be redone. (working with metal isn't really my think I guess.)
2. I have no use for an empty case, I don't have any hardware to fit into that case, my current desktop already has the 2005-2007 aesthetic.

Take it to junk yard, get whatever money you can for it.

Yes. Don't listen to he's just some fucking autist. I will advise against ripping apart a nice working system for it though. Buy a mostly gutted or non-working system to do the case mod. If you find a mint condition case you just have to mod, then transfer the good internals into a beat up case. These workstations are hard to find and shouldn't be destroyed for a case mod.

Same goes for SGI, Sun and other Unix systems, though I'm personally going to try to fit some newer PC parts into a broken O2 system. Case mods are great, just don't be that asshole who shreds a working machine for it.

*thing

I actually picked up the system for cheap (because I used to had one 8 years ago, nostalgia), including an 20" Apple Cinema Display. these sets usually go for over 100.

I am against ripping apart a fully working system too and I've said multiple times I do not want to mod it. Yet everyone keeps suggesting it.

Makes an alright alternative Linux/BSD system but I wouldn't really discount Tiger either, there's really nothing you can't do on it and it offers the more unique experience compared to operating systems you can run on any regular PC.

I don't really know what super special suggestion you think you're going to get, though, it's not a special-purpose piece of hardware, but the design is wonderful and the architecture somewhat exotic enough that it could make a fun general-purpose secondary to keep around. I use my 2.3 DC for development/remote work, email, office and whatever else with web browsing thrown in, it's also the best thing I've got that can run Bernhard Baehr's PDP-8/E simulator, which is the easily the best of its kind. It's also more than usable as a server if you'd like something nice looking to fill that role, the early G5s aren't really that hot.

Whatever you decide, don't bother listening to the morons ITT who think the only worthwhile solution is turning it into some ugly ATX frankenstein because you can't play games or waste away on YouTube with it. It's a shitty case for that job anyway with only two disk bays, four expansion slots and one 5.25'' dedicated optical bay, and the guts are half of the design to begin with.

The display is still very nice, matte and high color accuracy for its time. Suffers from some temporary burn in and runs rather warm but it's still a very nice display.

It has two half circle burns(?) on the bottom, but it's a nice 16:10 1680x1050 resolution.

A G5 without the G5 inside is just an empty aluminum husk, I've never seen a mod that actually does that design justice and so much of what makes them actually special stretches beyond the fashionable cheese grater.

I mean, I'm with in that modding busted systems isn't really that big a deal, but destroying something that still works perfectly fine just because you want a prettier gaming PC to post on Reddit/bst is just stupid and ignorant.

That's a bummer. I got a broken one for 20 bucks for my gf (male) when she bought her macbook back in 2013 and repaired it, the panel turned out to be in a perfect condition and she still uses it.

>Have two of these
>Never tried to run either
>Both need RAM and HDD
>Only one has 9800 Pro
>One of them has severe corrosion
>Neither have batteries
wat do

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Clean them
Add RAM
Test them

No need for a battery if you keep it plugged in. 9800 Pro is nice, I'm stuck with an FX 5200, can't upgrade to a generic graphics card because then I'll lose the ADC connector.

They can take some (a long) time turning on when pressing the power button after a long time being unplugged, I thought mine was dead.

I think I remember you, the one with the 9800 Pro was a pretty good factory configuration too. Shouldn’t be too hard to pick up some DDR and a hard disk for that if you’ve got $30-40 laying around.

I’d really like a nice DP 2.0 to throw 10.2 on, early OS X had its flaws but I really liked that transitional phase of Aqua.

I got them both for $20. I guess I could try to get a motherboard battery for both and try to sell.

Nice, I paid 30 euro for the mac and the screen, they usually go for a lot more here, starting from 50 for just the mac.

You can do anything forever. When I was macfag child, I thought if I had 20k cash to buy one such beast I would never have to buy another computer again. I am of course always right.

I was macfag child too, now I'm Linux girl.

Could part out the corroded one and throw the proceeds into the good one, whether you’re selling or keeping it.

They’re always good to keep around for *nixy shit too, even if you’re running 10.1 or 10.2 on them, not to mention the endless shit you can pull off the Macintosh Garden and run in Classic mode.

tits or gtfo, post cunny too

Yeah, this. It's the best machine you can get to run classic mac OS software. There is some neat music production software that can still be useful.

The corroded one has nothing the other doesn't. I can just get a spare disk and RAM for those.

I always forget about audio software, there’s definitely tons of that shit and it’s easy to get, too.

Ricing classic Mac OS with Kaleidoscope is fun too, too bad the G5’s won’t boot OS 9 standalone.

>I doubt I'll find 8x 1GB DDR400 DIMMS, in matched pairs, for cheap
It can do 2GB per slot for total of 16, not just 8.

>Same for the CPUs, these will be expensive as well. Too expensive for an old machine like this. Dual 2.5GHz would cost me over a 100 bucks incl. shipping.
It's cheaper to buy a Quad than to upgrade one to Quad, your motherboard can't use that upgrade. It's two time two cores.

>I feel like tiger + gentoo dualboot would be the best option for now.
Leopard and Debian will give you much better support though.

>However what can I use this old tower for aside from space heater?
Being a road warr... cyberspace warrior botnet free.

Sure, just figured it was an option to get some funding or more space if you wanted it.
I actually think the DDR ones did max at 1 GB per slot for 8 total, I remember looking into a DP 1.8 of my own and finding that out. The DDR2 ones upped it to 16.

I think they’ll even run 970MP modules too, it’ll just deactivate one of the cores.

I have disk and RAM for both. I just need time to get battery and make it work.

Do the G5s run the Classic MacOS9 mode app in OS X? I thought it was limited to G4 machines.

>the G5’s won’t boot OS 9 standalone
Is this a limitation of the OpenFirmware or the G5's architecture itself? I heard that the G5 lacks or has incompatible hardware instructions that differ greatly from the G4s and earlier. Is that true?

smash it into pieces and throw it into the trash

Now everything is RISC. Even modern x86 compadible microarchitectures are very similar to RISC.

No, it was because PowerPC was abandoned by IBM who focused on POWER and Apple didn't want to stick around to wait.
POWER4 (G5) had a 25% higher IPC clock-per-clock than NetBurst (Pentium 4), even though they came out a few months from each other.
POWER4 was pretty much outdated by 2004 when the PowerMac G5's still used it, of course it wasn't competitive anymore. A few years after that things like Cell came on the market that blew everything else away for a while.

POWER still exists and is very competitive, just not used in the consumer market.

>I thought they were a meme.
How come? You increase timings and clock rate, you increase voltage for those to work fine, you produce more heat and need heat spreaders.

>I actually think the DDR ones did max at 1 GB per slot for 8 total, I remember looking into a DP 1.8 of my own and finding that out. The D
Both do 16GB. I had a DP 1.8 with several 2GB sticks. Apple does not officially support it though.

They do but only when you use Tiger. Leopard has no support for it.
Mac OS 9 has no support itself for the PowerMac G5, it can't simply be hacked like on some G4's.

I've often wondered why there wasn't a massive reverse engineering effort to do that or to even build an open source clone, like what React OS is to Windows. Surely there would be a somewhat sizable demand from hipsters and people who liked using the OS. I've dug into the boot process a little trying to understand trampoline and the ROM and it's a real clusterfuck, but I don't think that what I'm talking about is impossible.

Oh, I get what you mean now, good shit.
I’m pretty sure the earlier models support Classic mode, just not direct booting. My DC model doesn’t even have the option to install it for some reason, but I haven’t looked into it much to see if it just needs to be configured for it.

I honestly don’t know much about the specifics on OS 9 support for the G5’s since I’ve never looked too much into it (I’ve got some G4s and G3s too and tend to just dedicate the G5s to OS X) but I think it’s just a lack of necessary architecture support or even just artificial limitation to encourage users to migrate. Don’t think the G5 has any real compatibility issues with G4 and earlier software based on how Classic mode works, but I could be wrong.
Maybe just a cultural difference with the user base I guess, still plenty of old Macs to go around and decent emulation for those who want to mess with it, not to mention it would probably be a mess to work with, at least NT is somewhat more modern in its design.

I bet it's full of dust

Install MorphOS. Have fun with an amiga-like desktop.

Just look at it.
It's a beautiful machine. it was back when apple made machines that were not only pretty to look at, but also practical.

Why did they have to bring out the fucking trashcan in the exact year I could have finally afforded a Mac Pro?

MorphOS cost money and there isn't much software for it, I heard only a small collection of original Amiga software works on it.

Is there much in the way of applications for it, like through a compatibility later or native development?

Guess this answers my question.

Should be enough to have things to do, and there are ports of games newer than the amiga. No idea about the compatibility layer, since I've never had a PPC Mac or compatible hardware like the Pegasos boards, so could never run MorphOS myself.

it might run mpeg2 at 1080i

good G5s can usually handle 1080p fine with a dedicated player

I have no problems with 720p and 1080p h264/x264 on a 2.0 DP

How realistic is it to retrofit the G5 (aka sexiest case of all time) with modern components? I heard that all the connectors and screw locations are nonstandard.

If you have the right tools, not hard.

Upgrade it and give it a purpose again maybe even as your daily driver.
youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2ZSie7zeU

That's a Mac Pro, you can make that a 12 core Xeon with 1080 Ti, 128GB RAM and NVMe SSDs, a complete different system from the Power Mac G5 we're discussing.

I like the portable version!

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Neat, I used to have a 12" iBook G4, 1.33GHz

iBooks are cute, I have one too.
It's nice to see Apple hardware that was actually well made and felt "premium" and not just like a toy.

I really want a 12" PowerBook or iBook again, but they're too expensive to just buy them for nostalgia and collecting.

Yeah, just keep your eyes open, I wanted one for a few years but didn't buy one until I saw a nice deal.

make it fly like a G6

What would you say is a good deal for a 12" Powerbook G4 1.33GHz, 1,25GB RAM?

throw it away, it's not worth a second of electricity

About $10 for your time to take it to a dumpster

You aren't worth a breath of oxygen either, now I am not telling you to kys either. I can perfectly judge if a classic piece of computer hardware is worth keeping and putting it to use or not. Yes it uses a lot of power, but so does gaming and mining for cryptocurencies.

Drill a hole in the case and make sweet love to the beauty of Apple's space-age design.

Then install gentoo.

I guess it's pretty personal, depending on how much it's worth to you. I paid 35€ for the one in the picture, but it's a 15" one in excellent condition and battery that lasts still a hour on use. I did bargain it down a little from the original price also.

That's a good deal, the cheapest PowerBooks/iBooks I can find start at 75 euro.

Yeah that's a little bit too harsh of a price for something like that. I've seen actual Quad G5's go for less.

Find hipster to sell it to. Paint is as a poor man's Talos.

Any Athlon 64 X2 will be better.

>A few years after that things like Cell came on the market that blew everything else away for a while.
BS. Cell was pretty much a GPGPU-level sort of speciality accelerator. As a CPU it absolutely sucked balls. Think in-order Atom-like performance. Single core.

Found three of these in a dumpster. They should have stayed there.

I would take them. Not fan of Apple, but nice to poke around in such stuff. I guess you live in a good place dumpster-wise.

I took them. The cooling loops had blown and destroyed the CPUs and motherboards. They're currently being gutted.

Still higher IPC than Pentium 4. It's real power came out when you also utilized the SPEs. Not just the multithreaded POWER PPE.
Cell was not only in use in the Playstation you know, it's sister was used in the Xbox 360, that was more focused on the CPU part of design, as the PS3 version of the Cell was supposed to be also a GPU replacement.
Cell was used for years afterwards by IBM themselves and got several upgrades.