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What To Do With an Old G5 Tower?

Posted by timothy on from the such-a-beautiful-exterior dept.

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. 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?"

4 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. Old Games by painandgreed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm keeping mine around to run games on, especially old classic games that have stopped working under newer versions of OS X or Intel chips. In addition to that, it might go to my photo studio as a browser and photo editing machine.

  2. Re:retire it by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are so many reasons why that can happen though. One of the first things i think of is that your program works well with the cache line size of the G4 (32bytes, i think) whereas the Core 2 is loading up more than it needs when it loads each new cache line (256bytes, i think).
    You'll probably find if you make even the slightest changes to the data structure size or alignment in the program the benchmarks will switch around.

    In the end CPUs have to be general and there is no doubt that in general the current x86s are faster. If you find the G4 is faster for you well then i say keep using it. It's an exceptional circumstance that you happen to have where your code closely matches the design of the G4.

  3. Re:Audio Workstation/Recording Studio by jewishbaconzombies · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bingo.

    I had the bottom of the line G5 for a time and had 2 other computers that had replaced it. Between Berkley and Emeryville, there were several studios and colleges for advanced audio. I think I got about 60-75% of what I paid for it. They didn't even haggle (and I priced a bit high for haggleability).

  4. Re:yellow dog linux still around? by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. The Powermac G5s all idle at around 150W, and most used about 600-700W under load. Left idle all year serving files it'll cost $150 a year just in electricity to run... All this for a slower machine than a MacMini, which doing the equivalent thing would use 10W.