Help me with my purchase dilema...

[KuruMonkey]

I'm looking to buy a powermac g5, to replace my current desktop PC.

The PC is an AMD Athlon XP2500+ w/ 512Mb ram, and is only _slightly_ too slow for the work I need to do on it. (web design but an increasing amount of photo work). I'm deciding betweeen the single 1.8, or the new dual 2.0 (I'm not impressed that the single 1.8 is basically unchanged in the current shakeup; so I'm thinking 2x2.0 currently)

My dilema is I don't really know how simple upgrading the upgradeable bits of a G5 is.

To get specific; If I buy a machine with the bottom-end GFX card in, and want to upgrade the card later, do I need a specific Mac-friendly card? Or is any AGP card OK? (and which variant of AGP slot is in the G5?)

Likewise; the optical drive. From the look of things, I could downgrade the optical drive in the G5 to a combo drive (knocking off £60 - more than the cost of a dual-layer drive anyway!), is it then a case of "any DVD drive will do"? Or does it need to be a specific type? (I get the impression the G5 case has simply got a built in "stealth door", but is that really the case?)
...
basically: I already have a 4x dvd writer in the PC, which is fine for my purposes at the moment; I can save £60 and prevent the feeling of wasted moneys if I can swap that drive in straight away... (I mean; I really don't need to own 2 DVD writers...)

To sum up; I switched from PCs to Mac "mentally" a while back, but my current 2 Macs are a powerbook and a Mini; neither of which need anything they didn't ship with, other than a RAM upgrade for the PB.

From my PC background, with machines I understand fully, I'd be happy to buy the base spec and chop+change parts I have already that I don't need to improve in order to get the most efficient use of my money. Unfortunately I don't really fully understand exactly _what_ bits of hardware are going to be Mac-Compatible.

To sum up;

I'd like to skimp on the "superdrive", because I have a DVD writer I'd be happy to re-use.

I'd also like to skimp on the video card, in the short term, and upgrade later.

The purpose of the skimping is that I'd also like to fit a new camera into budget, and I can't _quite_ make it all fit yet...

Some kind soul educate me, please

 

[jhelm007]

I don't have any experience with the G5s, but I have totally pimped out an old g4 and an old g3. From that experience I can tell you that not every optical drive is readily compatible with the mac, however there is a hack called patchburn that enables burning from the desktop and from the iApps with nearly every drive in production. As far as AGP cards go... only Mac edition video cards work with macs (some pc versions can be flashed, but sometimes they don't work as well). To make that more than just an inconvenience the mac versions are usually considerably more expensive. Hard drives and memory for the G5s are basically comodity PC components so those upgrades are easy. To see how much upgrades will likely cost I recomend other world computing's website: www.macsales.com. They have a configurator that gives you a selection of only those parts compatible with your machine. once you find out the manufacturer and mfg part # you can look for better deals on froogle or pricegrabber or similar. OWC is a good starting point and often they have very good prices as well as excelent support. (I should get paid for that plug )

Try to get a close out 2GigHz PM they'll be on sale soon. They have the PCI-X slots which will be more useful in the future and which are not included in the new models.

Well that's my $0.02