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From: J. J. Lodder on 21 Jul 2010 16:35
Colin Harper <colinharper(a)x.com.invalid> wrote:

> Looking for an upgrade to our ageing 1.0GHz G4 eMac. It's just no good these
> days for the little one's bob the builder and other CeeBeebies style flash
> heavy websites. The little eMac I think is doing well on 10.5 with 768MB and
> a G4!
>
> PowerMac wasn't even on the radar but a recent thread points at a recon
> PowerMac G5 for cheap money. With 1GB. I'd need to put in at least 2GB and
> I'll bet the memory is in quad 256MB modules :-(

It will be fine on 1 GB, for just browsing.
(and yes, four slots, to be filled pairswise)

> Anyway, can someone who's owned one of these or has more experience let me
> know how much difference I'm likely to see going from a 1.0GHz G4 eMac to a
> 1.6GHz G5 Powermac ?

It will appear to be a lot faster.

> It'd be used for Pages and flash heavy children's websites as we use the G4
> now. Oh.. And how loud are they? The eMac is no whisper... Boing... Whirrrr
> when that thing's on. Power consumption not much of an issue so long as the
> sleep consumption is quite low. It's only on for an hour a day or so.

It will be fairly silent while not working very hard.

Jan
From: eastender on 23 Jul 2010 09:45
In article <0001HW.C86D010D018A6171B02919BF(a)news-europe.giganews.com>,
Colin Harper <colinharper(a)x.com.invalid> wrote:


> Anyway, can someone who's owned one of these or has more experience let me
> know how much difference I'm likely to see going from a 1.0GHz G4 eMac to a
> 1.6GHz G5 Powermac ?

I wouldn't. I've a 1.6GHZ Powermac that I used for quite a while after a
G4 - now it seems awfully slow compared to an Intel Mac Mini I have. In
fact it's too slow for browser Flash games etc and it won't run latest
versions. It's also huge and power hungry.

Yes it was a big step up at the time. But that time has long gone.

E.
From: Rowland McDonnell on 23 Jul 2010 21:00
Colin Harper <colinharper(a)x.com.invalid> wrote:

[snip]

> Anyway, can someone who's owned one of these or has more experience let me
> know how much difference I'm likely to see going from a 1.0GHz G4 eMac to a
> 1.6GHz G5 Powermac ?

A useful amount - maybe even quite a lot in some cases. The G5s manage
even 32 bit processing more efficiently than G4s, so you'll see more
improvement than the raw CPU clock rate comparison would suggest.

They're certainly very good at audio/video encoding - although I did
notice that Apple's really gone to town on that recently, having seen
the absolutely blistering speed that iTunes can churn out AAC files from
AIFF originals on this Core2Duo iMac. Other audio or video encoding
seems to work /slightly/ more slowly on this 3.06GHz Core2Duo Intel iMac
than it did on the older 2.5GHz 4G5 (which also had a faster optical
drive).

> It'd be used for Pages and flash heavy children's websites as we use the G4
> now.

My 2.5GHz quad G5 could handle BBC iPlayer HD streams, the heaviest CPU
load I've met from any Website. But only just. However, since I never
saw the Flash process decoding the video report more than about 70% of
one CPU in use (that's 70%/4 of total CPU available - 17.5% of total
CPU), whatever the bottleneck was, it wasn't CPU.

Based on that, I'd guess that a 1.6GHz wouldn't be up to handling BBC HD
video streams but it'd be up for almost anything else.

btw, my old quad G5 had more `snappy' than the 3.06GHz Core2Duo iMac
that replaced it - it's as snappy as a Mac Plus or SE/30, and that's
much better than the average Mac since the good old days. The 4G5 had
the most monster graphics card available for it when new and 6.5GB
RAM...

> Oh.. And how loud are they?

I don't know about that model, but my old quad core G5 could sound like
a jet engine ready for take-off when the fans were going flat out under
high CPU load.

But at low CPU load, it was a lot quieter than the rather noisy 1.25GHz
2G4 it replaced.

[snip]

Rowland.

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From: Ian McCall on 24 Jul 2010 03:53
On 2010-07-21 19:54:53 +0100, Colin Harper <colinharper(a)x.com.invalid> said:

> PowerMac wasn't even on the radar but a recent thread points at a recon
> PowerMac G5 for cheap money. With 1GB. I'd need to put in at least 2GB and
> I'll bet the memory is in quad 256MB modules :-(
>
> Anyway, can someone who's owned one of these or has more experience let me
> know how much difference I'm likely to see going from a 1.0GHz G4 eMac to a
> 1.6GHz G5 Powermac ?

I'm assuming you mean the scrumpymacs thread, if so you'll have seen
the same one I saw and I must admit I immediately considered buying it
too.

By sheer co-incidence though, here's:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/07/23/2314248/What-To-Do-With-an-Old-G5-Tower?art_pos=6

I

had a 1.6 G5 (I -think-, might have been a 1.8). It did absolutely fine
for years but then became quite noisy - later OS updates seemed to
screw up the fans some how. It would struggle on some Flash sites today
I think, no idea how well it would do for h.264 etc..

I considered much for the same purpose you did: a kid's computer on
their Flash-based web site. I think I'd be better served getting an
Intel Mac Mini, even though the cost is more. I also considered it as
an iTunes server to be tucked away in a cupboard, but as that thread
points out the power consumption is probably such that it would be
overall cheaper to go low-spec Miniwards.


Cheers,
Ian

From: Chris Ridd on 24 Jul 2010 04:14
On 2010-07-24 08:53:08 +0100, Ian McCall said:

> I considered much for the same purpose you did: a kid's computer on
> their Flash-based web site. I think I'd be better served getting an
> Intel Mac Mini, even though the cost is more. I also considered it as
> an iTunes server to be tucked away in a cupboard, but as that thread
> points out the power consumption is probably such that it would be
> overall cheaper to go low-spec Miniwards.

Adobe are starting to drop PPC support in Flash, aren't they? So a PPC
Mac would not be good long term investment if all you wanted was Flash.

--
Chris

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