Technology, Support, and News Forum

[Sisco22 Profile]

Hey guys,
Im buying a G5 IMac 20" from a guy this weekend. He said it was a PowerPC G5 with a 2.1ghz processor, is this a dual core, or single?
Thanks.
Adam

[imnuts Profile Website]

Looking at the specs for the processor, it is going to most likely be a single core as they didn't have the PPC chips with dual cores on them until fairly late and I'm guessing they only went into the PowerMacs and Xserve systems and didn't make it into the iMac line.

[Sisco22 Profile]

Hmm. I was looking at the specs for Parralles and was wanting to run Windows 7 on it as well, but it doesn't look like i'll be able to do that. It requires one of the Intel chips.

[NT50 Profile]

If I were you, I woudl leave the PPC alone.
I still have one and it runs great but as you stated, it will not run windows.

Now I have two dual core Intels and have run windows on one of them with bootcamp. It run good but I found myself running Mac OS more than windows and took windows off.

[imnuts Profile Website]

It depends on what you want the system to do. If you're looking for a computer for video editing or just for web/email purposes, it would be a decent system as the PPC chips are very good considering how old they are. Not sure how it would stack up against a current Core 2 Duo system for performance or an i7 chip, but they were very efficient processors. The only thing you'd have to do is make sure that you keep backups of programs as I'm guessing fewer and fewer are going to be PPC/x86 packages, especially now that Apple has gone to x86/x86-64 only and dropped PPC support.