Hey,
I have an old Power Mac g5 gathering dust at home, and I was asking myself:
“What can I do with this old man ?”
I first thought of just taking the case, but it’s not optimal to build a PC :P
It is also too much power consuming to make it a sever.
Do you have any idea ?
Thanks !
Lots of people, including myself, case-mod them to fit standard or extended ATX boards. The workstation style flow-through cooling can be really good.
There are guides online, but it’s easy to figure out. The cases are worth money to people who want to do this.
I have for project to build a gaming pc, but I think I won’t use it for this (for now, I’ll see when I’ll be more experienced)
Grate some cheese?
It is sexy furniture, but one thing you could do is load it up with software from its time and just retro compute for fun. I’ve seen people do that to play old windows 95 games and stuff.
I’m on a 90s dos/windows gaming group on Facebook and people there love showing off their old builds full of era appropriate games. And for those with the passion but lacking the hardware, there exodos.
Put the cheapest, crappiest Windows PC in it and post it on some Mac forums.
Lol, or use it to house a dozen nucs
Heat a room.
This. Anyone telling you PCs could do more than that is fooling you.
Around 15 years ago when my college was decommissioning them we used them as doorstops in the IT department.
You really need two for a decent coffee table, so no ;-)
I have also a G3, so I could probably make a “new art” coffee table x)
I’m thinking G4 under a sheet of thick glass asymmetrically balanced with the G3 weighing down the short end… probably have to fill the G3 with cement or something though ;-)
We used a G4 as a doorstop for a computer lab, could bring ourselves to throw out that 1 ton beauty
CMU?
It was a private training company, but I’m glad to hear we weren’t the only ones
If you like Amiga Workbench, you can always try MorphOS. But that is not a straightforward process to get into. And it’s not free software…
If it’s an earlier model, they make great ‘retro’ games and software machines. Install 10.4 Tiger, set up the Classic (OS 9 environment). That gives you a decent chance of running stuff from System 6-ish (late 80s) up to mid 2000s. Not like Macs had a lot of games or unique software, but it can be cool for the heck of it.
Also, with their FireWire ports, it can be handy if you still have old DV or HDV camcorders, pretty straightforward to capture old tapes. The later models are better for this purpose, more processing power and better graphics cards.
If neither of those use cases appeals to you or sounds like an applicable use case, the G5 towers are the best to use for ATX case mods. But you did mention you didn’t see a point in that. Therefore… Recycle it or pass it on to someone who is interested in tinkering with it. After 20 years, just like a lot of computers from that era, they don’t have alot of justified use cases… And that’s okay!
Years and years ago when I had one and Apple had stopped supporting - I got a copy of Linux and installed it and ran a Minecraft server for a while on it.
Unfortunately, not many linux distros support PowerPC and Minecraft is now way to heavy for this old hardware…
Yeah that figures especially on the latter. It has been a few years since I tinkered with it.
Thanks Microsoft
Hold down a decent pile of paper? Block a door from squeaking open when the house settles in the night? Keep a cat from rolling down a gentle hill? Make a child cry when they unwrap it some holiday morning?
Can you remove the innards and put something current in it?
Or is it built in a way that it’s forever useless?
It’s not forever useless, but it requires a fair bit of fabrication.
I passed on one years ago because it looked like way too much of a project. If I remember correctly, nothing would fit stock and the case was somehow divided by a bunch of stuff that would have to be cut away.
I suspected as much. Apple isn’t known for its standard hardware.
People are making PCs with this case
Install Mac OS 9 and play Yoot’s Tower
Dude! I saw this cool thing one time where they made a bench out of two of those. It was just a flat piece of wood that connected the two towers (lol)
Never have too many cheese graters
