- #Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core upgrade
- #Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core software
- #Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core Pc
#Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core Pc
As a PC person I'm impressed with how well Leopard and the G5 have aged.
#Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core upgrade
It's a close contemporary of Windows Vista, but whereas Vista was mocked as a bloated mess Leopard was generally regarded as a decent-albeit-inessential upgrade of 10.4 Tiger. OSX 10.5.8 Leopard was the final version of OSX for the PowerPC-era Macintoshes. It has more fans, but they run slower, only going mad every once in a while. On the positive side the G5 is quieter than my PC. That's almost twice as much as my fridge, and apparently with very heavy processing power consumption goes up to 400+ watts. At idle it consumes 140 watts of power - only ten watts less than my PC under load - and when taxed it sucks up 280+ watts. It has two spinning hard drives and an ancient Radeon 9600. In comparison my new, fourteen-year-old Power Macintosh G5 has two separate 64-bit PowerPC 970 processors running at 2ghz.
#Power mac g5 2.3 ghz dual core software
They were only useful for burning data discs, however, as only the fastest G5s had the necessary combination of processor grunt and graphics hardware to decode Blu-Ray video, and even then finding PowerPC software that would play Blu-Ray films was problematic. The G5 predated Blu-Ray, but there were a couple of G5-compatible Blu-Ray drives. The G5 plays DVDs perfectly well, like every desktop computer since the late 1990s. Instead there was a familiar chime and OS X 10.5.8 loaded up. I was slightly disappointed when the machine started not with flames but with a muted whoosh, which settled down into a quiet hum. Furthermore I removed all of my clothes out of fear and assumed a defensive posture, attempting to prove to any and all observers that I was no harm to anyone. I sent a letter to the Home Office and British Telecom and my electricity provider to inform them that I was not a terrorist, and that the souls of the dead are reincarnated on Jupiter, and that I no longer wished to be married to Helena Bonham-Carter. Back in 2003 this very machine was, in Apple's words, "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer".īefore turning it on for the first time I informed the local flying club that I was about to activate a powerful radio frequency source. Mine is a 2.0ghz dual-processor model, the flagship of the first wave of G5s. Almost fifteen years later G5s are available on the used market for almost nothing - postage is incredibly awkward - so I decided to try one out.
I knew that it had a striking case and a reputation for high power consumption and heat output, and for being 64-bit at a time when that was rare in the PC world, but that's about it.
I've long been a PC person, and from my point of view the G5 came and went in the blink of an eye. Our time in the sun is brief, the G5's time especially so. The G5 puts me in mind of an ageing footballer who finally has a chance to play a World Cup match he is called up from the substitute's bench, entertains the crowd for twenty minutes, but the team loses, and by the time of the next World Cup the uniform is the same but the players are all different. In 2003 it was a desktop supercomputer that was supposed to form the basis of Apple's product range for years to come, but within three years it had been discontinued, along with the entire PowerPC range, in favour of a completely new computing architecture. Apple launched the G5 in 2003 with great fanfare, but nowadays it has a decidedly mixed legacy. So weighty that it creases my paper backdrop, even if I put something underneath it. Let's have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5, a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks.