OpenTube

Is The Power Mac G5 Really Obsolete?

Ionic1k

131,890 views

In this video I got a PowerMac G5 from a thrift store for $25, I used one as my main computer back in 2015 and wanted to see if it still holds up today. I try Mac OSX 10.5.8 and after I install Gentoo Linux! Gentoo has made this machine a lot more fun to play with!

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MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO
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VECTOR GRAPHICS - DESTINE: SoundCloud: destine
VECTOR GRAPHICS - ALBA83: SoundCloud: alba-83
VECTOR GRAPHICS - CASCADE: SoundCloud: cascade
VECTOR GRAPHICS - DRAPES: SoundCloud: drapes

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Floppy option drive for Indigo 2
Galileo Video for Indigo 2 (card and video breakout box)
SGI granite Keyboard and Mouse
Teal feet for Indigo 2
SGI Indy
SGI Challange S
SGI Octane
SGI O2
SGI IRIS Indigo
SGI ONYX Reality Engine 2 or VTX
SGI IRIS Crimson (Elan,Extreme,VGXT,RE)
SGI Origin 350
SUN SPARCSTATION 5
SUN ULTRA 10
SUN ULTRA 5
SUN servers (any)
Silicon graphics CRT Monitor (any)
SUN ULTRA 40
Macintosh Quadra 700
Macintosh Quadra 900 or 950

20 Comments

@PiggyPorkchop 1 year ago (edited)

Every few years YouTube puts a video on my homepage about using the G5 in current year, glad to see some things never change.

@Jackpkmn 1 year ago

The Chromium thing made me laugh out loud for real. "I don't want to get shot in the foot so I reached for a giant cannon to shoot at my feet instead."

@blue82700 1 year ago

My college uses these things to hold up the benches in the buildings- 😂

@marksokolovsky1995 1 year ago (edited)

You actually can use SSDs on here, I've had a stable config on my Dual 2.0 7,2 2003 since late 2019: a 960 GB RAID0 Array using 4x 240 GB Sandisk SSD Plus, gets ~450 MB/s read and 385 MB/s write right on the boot drive! Using a seritek SATA PCI RAID0 card, too. I wrote about this on low end Mac. Nice video!

@colinstu 1 year ago (edited)

It's funny... way back sometime 2014-2015 we had a customer who dropped off her Powermac G5 and she "wanted it upgraded" and refused to get any newer machine. So we maxed out the ram and put an SSD in too, it was definitely peppier, but even by then it was starting to show its age in web browser use. That was only a dual core machine and no high end GPU so that didn't help, but the fact a Core 2 Duo could crush it still and were a dime-a-dozen back then, ouch. If she's still alive a decade later I sure hope she moved to some apple silicon.

@blooder81 1 year ago

Needs a clean and new thermal paste!

@GravartyZWEI 1 year ago (edited)

2:02 not entirely true since a beta build of Snow Leopard for PowerPC was leaked a few years ago and the PPC community keeps fixing things to make it more stable.

@murata4244 1 year ago

Dude that is a steal to find it at a thrift store for only 25 dollars and it still be working. You struck gold

@LKComputes 1 year ago

12:35 Some 2005 PPC Macs can actually boot from GPT because of their newer Open Firmware, so what you read was technically true, but for the most part not applicable.

@bagel-0123 1 year ago

for the 'registration' part at 7:37, you can just press Command + Q to make a regular user account.

@UrkiMimi 1 year ago

I remember having a dual-cpu config back in 2019 to toy around with and the CPUs would sometimes not recognize or the system would kernel panic outright lmao

@Denuwu 1 year ago

Technically you can install 10.6 on PPC as there's a beta that was leaked online some time ago

@QUANTUMJOKER 1 year ago

I had a 2.3 GHz dual-CPU Power Mac G5 several years ago. I upgraded it with two SSDs (Samsung SSDs are generally very compatible with even old Macs like this), a 128 MB video card and a bunch of I/O cards, and I ultimately upgraded the RAM to a peculiar 7 GB (six 1 GB modules and two 512 MB modules).

@AnotherLotte 1 year ago

You're the second person I've gotten to witness compiling and installing Gentoo on PPC. hella nice, I wish I had gotten to keep a Mac Mini G4 a customer had asked me if it was worth anything. I offered them like, $80 and the refused it kept the thing in a non-functional state. Which sucks, because I had gotten it to boot with a SATA M.2 SSD to IDE converter, and I played around with it for a few days, I really wanted to keep it.

@JackBender 1 year ago

Hi, you can use SATA SSDs in the PowerMac G5 as long as the SSD is able to auto-negotiate to SATA-1, so that pretty much excludes all SATA-3 SSDs, and you need an older SATA-1 or SATA-2 SSD for the whole thing to work.
I've had good success with Intel 320 Series SSD in my PowerMac G5.

@gcvrsa 1 year ago

I'm still using my Dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 PCI-X as my digital audio workstation, because it works, and my M-Audio Delta 1010 isn't compatible with newer machines. The Delta 1010 is one of the best 24-bit/96 KHz interfaces ever made, so there's no real need to replace it.

@EdgeCreativeSydney 1 year ago

just purchased 4 of them for no reason at all. I fell in love with them back in 2003 at multimedia collage. They are works of art!

@esra_erimez 1 year ago

This was a very fun video. I don't have the patience for Genntoo but I like to watch over people do it

@RYzE_B3Y0ND 1 year ago

You guys that do this kind of stuff are wizards. The amount of knowledge and patience needed is legendary.

@NarrowCobra2119 1 year ago (edited)

you can use an ssd on one of those, you just have to format it in Mac OS Extended Journaled on another machine then put it in, the G5 Quad can be overclocked to 4.5GHz on each CPU...