I have been repeatedly asked to do an episode on the Power Mac G5. Now, I've
never actually owned one of these and, to be honest, I've never really understood what
the appeal was. I managed to borrow one from Curtis Murray, owner of the CGX video
game store in Denton, Texas.
And the first thing I noticed about this machine
before even turning it on, is that it is BIG. It's also very heavy; in fact it weighs about 50 pounds.
You definitely don't want to be lugging this thing around much and lugging this
thing to the mall was enough to nearly kill me. On the bright side it, it makes a
good chair when you need to stop for a rest. It also makes a great pedestal for
posing for those nerdy tech photos.
If you need to take it very far, I recommend using a dolly.
So, now that I have one, it's time to run it through its paces.
Take a look at the production quality. This is something you just don't see in
modern PCs. This thing's more beautiful on the inside the most computers are on
the outside. This thing is all aluminum and it appears to be actually machine and not stamped
Surprisingly, it does use Serial ATA hard drives, which
I have not previously seen in PowerPC computers.
So, believe it or not, this thing has a water-cooling
system to keep these big power-hungry G5 CPUs cooled down.
You can even see there's a warning label here, about if you happen to see water in
there, that obviously needs to be serviced because it might be leaking.
You can see it has for full-size PCI-Express expansion sockets of which right now there's a
really fancy video card in there. You can see here on the other side, it has two DVI
video ports, so that you can run dual monitors. So, I've heard that one of the
main reasons that Apple switched to Intel processors was due to energy consumption.
Looking at this unusual power cable and I'm starting to wonder what the energy
consumption is on this thing.
So let's get this thing hooked up. I don't have room in the studio, so I'm
going to set it up on my office desk. I'm gonna use two monitors so that I can take
full advantage of this thing. I'm going to put the tower on the floor under the
desk because I'm told to expect this thing to be noisy, so that should keep
the noise down. So, I want to run it through some tests to see how it
performs. Now, I did an episode of few years ago about the G4 systems. I think
it's safe to say that anything the G4 could do, could also be done here, so I'm
going to focus on doing things that maybe the G4 could not handle.
So, let's take a look at the specs.
This thing has quad cores, running at 2.5 GHz. it has 8.5
gigabytes of RAM; in fact let's take a look at the RAM configuration. Wow! This
thing has eight sockets, and it appears you could -theoretically- put 16 Gigs of
RAM this thing. So, that's a decent amount of RAM, even for today. But it was a crazy
amount of RAM back in 2005 when this thing was made. So, let's take a look
at the operating system.
Obviously, it cannot run anything 10.6 or newer because all those require an Intel processor.
And it's not compatible with anything earlier than 10.4 so that
just leaves the two operating systems as your choices.
Theoretically it should be able to run Linux, which I'll try out later.
This machine is also significant for another reason: if you take a look at all of the
Power Mac G5 versions, they made them in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
Now, these machines have two processors in them,
and these machines have two cores inside of a processor,
and this unit here has two processors, each with two cores
and that's the unit I have here with me.
So, this machine represents the fastest of all of the PowerPC machines that
Apple ever produced, as well as the very last one they produced.
One of the first things I noticed when I fired it up was how noisy it was.
Even being under the desk, it was annoyingly loud. But otherwise, the feel of the operating
system and its responsiveness felt just like using a modern Mac.
The dual monitors seemed to work fine, even on this decade old operating system.
So one, of the big problems with any of the PowerPC-based macs today is finding a
modern working web browser. None of them are up-to-date and many websites will
complain that your browser is not supported.
Nevertheless, I was still able to use just about every website I wanted to,
using the TenFourFox browser. The speed was tolerable in most cases. The only two
websites that really gave me any issues with speed was YouTube and Facebook.
So, one of the biggest problems with playing games on this machine is simply
finding games that supported it. Most of the games I found that do support it run
actually just about as well on my G4 system, and of course all of the newer
games require an Intel processor so they don't work.
Nevertheless, I tried a game of Unreal Tournament 2004 and it played very smoothly.
I also wanted to mention that, throughout this video, you'll see a lot of scenes
where I have a camera pointed at a monitor like this. I normally prefer
screen capture software, as it's much cleaner looking, but in cases like this i
don't want to do anything to hurt the performance of the machine that I'm
showin,g so that's why I'm using this method. However I am capturing audio
directly to another computer because, if I weren't, you'd be hearing this: [LOUD FANS]
I also played some Duke Nukem 3D, one of my all-time favorite games.
Unfortunately the PowerPC version of EDuke doesn't support some of the more
high-end rendering modes.
So, what about playing video? I've got a movie here on the hard drive. This is a
1080p high-definition movie.
It appears it can actually handle playing it, although it requires all of the
machine's horsepower to accomplish it, and this, of course, means that the fans are
running at full speed. So, even though you can watch the movie, you'll probably need
to turn on subtitles or wear some headphones, because otherwise you won't
be able to hear the movie.
YouTube has become a serious thorn in the side for all users of older
computers. So, the irony is that even though this machine can handle 1080p
video when played locally,
YouTube is a totally different story. Playing streaming video from within the
browser always requires a lot more CPU power for some reason, and so, as you can
see, it struggles to even handle 480p video. However, if we move it down to 360p
then it seems to be OK with that, even though it's still churning up all of the
system resources to do it, but that is at least something that the Power Mac G5
systems can at least do, which is play YouTube correctly, even if it's at the
lower resolution, because the G4 systems really can't play YouTube properly at
all these days.
So, I could literally feel the heat on my legs from this thing under the desk. It
really feels like I have a space heater under there.
In fact, I measured the temperature of the air coming out of the back and it was a
hundred and five degrees. A hundred and five degrees really isn't all that
hot for any computer, even an efficient computer, but when you see the amount of
airflow coming out of this thing, then 105 degrees suddenly becomes quite a bit
of heat. In fact, I began to wonder what the energy consumption of this thing was.
You may be wondering how much energy this thing consumed, so I decided to
connect up an Ampmeter and have a look.
It showed 0.4 amps from idle, and as much as 1.2 amps when playing 1080p video.
That translates 144 watts of power; however, that didn't seem to fit with
other reports I've heard about this machine. I tried a kilowatt meter and I
got a very different result.
I saw as much as 355 watts here which is more like what I expected and it's similar
to a small space heater, which makes sense why my feet kept getting so toasty.
Ok, so I tried for several days to install some form of Linux on this
machine. Now theoretically it should be able to run Linux and run it pretty
darn well with the CPU configuration and the RAM it has, and I've run Linux on
many G4 systems, and I've had very good luck, and one of the great things about running
Linux on a PowerPC machine is that it's about the only way to get an up-to-date web
browser. For example, you can get the latest version of Firefox to run on
Linux, despite what processor architecture that you might be using.
Unfortunately, I ran into some problems. I simply could not get it to install. Most
of the time it would crash at the very beginning of the installation, and one
time I managed to get about 75 percent through the Debian installation
and it crashed on me. So, I don't know what's causing that with this particular
machine but I decided not spend any more time on it.
So, what do I think about this machine?
Well, let me show you something. This is a Mac Mini. It came out about a year
after this machine was discontinued. Now, this machine is actually faster than
this machine, and I actually checked the energy usage on this machine with the
kilowatt meter and I got 16 watts when sitting idle at about 33 watts at its
max performance, so that means this machine uses over ten times the amount
of power and it's still not as fast as this one.
And this machine is light and it's quiet and this is just such a much
better machine and it really leaves no doubt in my mind that Apple made the
right decision when they left the PowerPC architecture behind and switched
to Intel. So, who does this computer appeal to these days?
Well, I am not really sure. I don't really find it all that appealing, but I know
that there are a lot of people that just really love this machine. I admit it's
constructed really well. I mean, I love the attention to detail that they put
into constructing the case and the internals of it, which Apple is pretty
much well known for that, anyway, but at the same time, it is so loud, and it runs
so hot and it's really not that powerful and it's so big; it takes up so much
space. It's almost like if you're the kind of person that likes to drive a
Ford F250 dually diesel pickup truck as your daily commuting vehicle and grocery
getter, then, an-and getting like 10 miles to the gallon while you do it, then
this is probably the computer for you, because this is the embodiment of the
same mentality, but me, you know, I would much rather go with even a G4 Mac Mini,
to be honest, over this big G5. Well guys, I hope you enjoyed this.
I've got a lot of other stuff coming down the pipeline, as usual, and I'll see
you next time.
T
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THE END!
Edited by Xilog