G5 Performance

Hi guys,

I'm new to the forum and will be getting my new mac towards the start of next week.

It is a G5 iMac with 17" Screen, 1.6Ghz CPU and 256MB Memory.

I have (waiting) OS X 10.4 Tiger, Microsoft Office 2008 Standard and two 512MB memory modules.

With this setup, how will the mac run? This is my first proper mac system, I'm a long term Windows user and fancy a change.

Well your 1 GB of ram will really help the G5. And it is still a really capable machine that can do most things. I would suggest when you can upgrading it to 2 GB ram through a 3rd party seller. That'll really make the whole experience rather wonderful.

I'm not sure how leopard will run on that system, but it'll love tiger. And the graphics card according to mactracker seems to be ok for most basic tasks and even a few of more complex ones. But it's not modern by any stretch.

The only catch is, cause it's a PPC (G5) machine, putting any flavour of windows on it will be rather hard or slow. Virtual PC might just work well. So keep that old windows box until one day in the long term future when you move to intel macs. But for now good luck with your new mac.

Excellent, many thanks for the reply.

The system I'm getting I think was a good deal, I paid £200 for it (About $400 USD)! I have agreed to sell my current computer system which is no major loss, as I have a brand new Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop I also use.

I was under the impression that Leopard ran slightly better than Tiger on these systems but I guess I have picked that up wrong - I must admit I was very surprised to read this. I can always see how I'll get on with Tiger and then maybe upgrade to Leopard when I become more comfortable with OS X.

I'll be using the system with the following applications... Safari (For GMAIL, Forums, eBay...), MSN Messenger, Photoshop CS2, iTunes and Dreamweaver for web design needs.

The switch should be rather interesting to say the least... it will be coming with a "Pro Keyboard" and a "Mighty Mouse" so I think I'm getting a good deal?

Yes I would say so! Only thing I could think of to make the switch more comfortable .. if the mighty mouse is a bit difficult (can take a bit to get used to) is to use and ordinary Microsoft 2 button instead. See how you go first.

That's if this machine comes with a mighty mouse. As originally when it was first released I don't think the might mouse was released. It just came with a one button mouse at the time.

Perhaps it's not a mighty mouse, was certainly advertised with one. Shall wait and see!

gana said:

Yes I would say so! Only thing I could think of to make the switch more comfortable .. if the mighty mouse is a bit difficult (can take a bit to get used to) is to use and ordinary Microsoft 2 button instead. See how you go first.

Click to expand...

Only buy another brand other than Microsoft. My wireless mouse is out of batteries so i'm using a Microsoft brand mouse and it feels very cheap....and it was pretty expenive! Not that I paid for it anyway.
Personal Preference really. I have a durabrand wireless mouse, and i think durabrand is considered a pretty cheap brand, but the mouse iself is REALLY nice, it's silver and black, and it was only $14.99 on sale and it lasts like 4 weeks with 2 AAA batteries. The model is SF-MW205. While googling it just now it seems like people have had problems with it for whatever reason, but it seems to be user error. And they all seem to be windows users, mostly complaining about the mouse not working after not being used for an hour or more, most get solved by simply hitting the side button to wake the mouse up, which is described in the manual. It's been great for me. FYI for anyone else the silver and black look would look great next to an aluminum iMac.
Just my 2 cents.
Durabrand is available at Wal-Mart by the way LOL.

Leopard will certainly run well on a G5 providing a possible HDD and memory upgrade. if you really wanna go all out you can go to 3rd party Apple Parts suppliers and install a new CPU or have one installed for you!

Hmm... I didn't think the CPU could be changed on the G5 iMac?