Lunatic1969 writes 'I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around.

What To Do With an Old G5 Tower? (Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius *. Consider that a bottom of the line MacMini is faster than your G5, and consumes 140W less power when idle, and 600W less power when under load. Btw, im a 22 year old college student.and my mac is a dual g4 500. I NEED A NEW MAC! Space Heater (Score: 4.

My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?' My favorite use for any G5 has been in the Marine environment as a Geo-Synchronous aquatic stabilizer.

Apowersoft video downloader for mac free. To use simply load any flavor of Linux you prefer, attach one (1) CAT5 securely to the G5 unit and to your MTV (Marine Transportation Vehicle). Place the G5 into a solution of 100% Dihydrogen Monoxide and feed out the CAT5 cable as needed to achieve Geo-Synchronous aquatic stabilization. If however you prefer to use a solution of 96.5% Dihydrogen Monoxide and 3.5% Sodium Chloride then I highly recommend net. It's about right. From [apple.com] idle 120W, max 420W for the single-processor 1.6GHz version, idle 140W, max 604W for the dual-processor 2GHz version.

What is the best mac computer for photography. We are continuing our series on how to choose and buy computer hardware for photography needs and today we will be providing suggestions on what Apple. Home » PC / Mac / Tablet Hardware » How to Buy an Apple MacBook for Photography. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window). One of the best photography blogs on the web Nasim.

The old G5s were power guzzlers. Each CPU could use 100W by itself.

They were the reason that Apple laptops were so slow for so long: IBM couldn't produce a decent low-power chip. Even the 'low power' FX variant used up to around 50W - there was no way Apple could fit that in a laptop. Remember that these machines come from the same era as the Prescott P4s, which peaked at 120W per CPU. Two CPUs, a load of support chips, RAM, multiple drives, and so on all added up. Some of the G5s were water cooled, and all of them came with an impressive case design to maximise air flow. One of my older machines is a G5 dual proc, 2.7 Ghz. That's still a VERY respectable clock speed, it's 64 bit and the dual procs means it's still pretty fast.

The submitter didn't mention what speed his was (I'm guessing slower) but depending on that, a G5 could very well be a useful machine. It's not like it's an Athlon or something that is both slow, 32 bit and single core. Since the G5 was designed for performance, it's not exactly a great file server chip though.

But it's far from being a 'space heater' as you say -- mine gets used every work day. As others have pointed out, either put linux on it, or put an older version of OS X on it. I still have 10.4 on mine because it was the last OS Apple produced that was streamlined for the PPC. However, now that Apple has stopped supporting it, I'll have to break down and put 10.5 on it. On other older machines though I have installed both pbbuttons and gtkpbbuttons which support a lot of of the media keys on the keyboard pretty well. G5's aren't incredibly slow, but nor are they particularly fast. The clock speed bump over the G4 meant the loss of some performance per cycle, and the amount of heat those things put out is obscene.

A reasonably clocked C2D or any Nehalem should be vastly faster than a G5. That must have taxed your brain to come up with this comparison. I'd slap Debian Sid on it, used it for distributed compiles, LLVM builds, development and basically learning the PowerPC architecture while running Computation Fluid Dynamics, FEA, etc. When it's sufficiently pointless one can use the Case and strip out the guts and build your own custom PC.

Sure, the comps we have at work are likely slower than any G5 and work just fine as long as one stay away from flash heavy websites. However if I took one home it would be too noisy to use as a server, and I can't think of any other use. It pains me to throw away useful hardware, I got three working computers stashed away that will likely never see use again, but ever so often I have to face reality due to space constraints:-( Unlike my computers a G5 will probably be worth quite a bit in 20-30 years tho. The page you link to is graphs of PPC binaries being either run on a PPC machine or an Intel one(under Rosetta).

Shockingly enough, PPC binaries ran rather faster on PPC. The previous page, where they benchmarked universal binaries, shows the C2D(a now not-very-exciting 1.8GHz unit) crushing the single core 1.8GHz G5 like a bug, and pulling approximate parity with a dual 2.5GHz PPC powermac, which was a firebreathing wind-tunnel of a machine. Back when Intel was busy pretending that the P4 could actually. What utter nonsense. I'm typing this now via my Dual G5 2.3ghz powermac that is perfectly servicable. Running OS X 10.5, as well. For web browsing, hulu, ableton live + reason + native instruments, even gaming (world of warcraft, soon to be intel only, though).