Avid6eek said:
Does the G5 use industry standard hardware? As in, can I use regular PC3200 memory in it as an upgrade? What about the SATA hard drives. Are they the same as regular SATA HDs you can buy in Best Buy? Thanks for the help.
As another user replied earlier, Crucial is great RAM to use in macs. Micron (which owns Crucial) also makes good RAM which works well in macs. Corsair memory is known to work perfect as well.
Buying more expensive memory with tighter timings is definitely a no... you will notice absolutely no difference since G5's default all memory to 2.5-4-4-8.
As a side note, I'd like to mention an annoying little marketing move Apple made advertising their flagship dual 2.5 G5 with a "faster" 1.25GHz FSB which seemed to make quite a few people think they would get higher memory throughput. What several people failed to notice or understand is that the speed of the RAM itself is the same it is in every other model, so that additional 250MHz offers absolutely no performance enhancement, and I really am not entirely sure why they even have that.
As for SATA drives, only spend your money on bridged SATA drives. Don't bother with Native SATA - the G5's do not support it or NCQ. As far as I know, Native SATA drives will still work in G5's, but will forfeit the additional functionality and performance basically defaulting the HD to the same as bridged SATA, and will of course turn the extra money you spent for a Native SATA drive into a complete waste.
74GB Raptors (10k RPM) offer NCQ functionality, which as I just stated is not supported by macs, HOWEVER you will still benefit from the additional RPMS.
I hope the next generation of G5's will feature compatibility for faster RAM, and Native SATA support (which is huge, especially for serious large-scale video editors.)