buying a used G5

[Jeff Carpenter]

Go to Apple.com, click on the “Store” tab and then scroll down and look for the big red “SAVE” tag. Click on that and then click on “Apple Certified – MAC.”

Scroll down to the G5s and find the cheapest one there…it’s $1,599. For DV work that will do just fine. You’ll need to add 3 things to it:

1) Final Cut Suite, obviously

2) More RAM. Don’t buy from Apple. I suggest Crucial.com, although there are many other places online. Buy 4 one-GB chips if you can afford it and add it to the 512 already in there. If you want to save some money, just add 2 GB, but that’s the least I would do. Be sure to follow the instructions, in the G5 machines it matters WHICH slots you put the RAM in:

https://www.apple.com/support/powermac/doityourself/memory.html

3) A scratch disc for media. I don’t know how much video you need to work with, but I’d suggest buying an internal 500 GB SATA drive from any computer store and putting it in as a 2nd drive. Set Final Cut to use that as the scratch disc and you’ll be good to go.

[Zak Mussig]

If you’re just doing DV, I’ll second what Jeff said. The only caveat I’d make is if you’re planning (or interested in) doing a lot of work in Apple’s Motion program, you may want to double-check the graphics card in the model Jeff recommended. Motion unloads a lot of work on the GPU, so the faster it is, the faster Motion is. May or may not be a huge deal for DV, and I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine. Just wanted to give you something else to consider.

Zak

[Rennie Klymyk]

If you are planning on keeping it and expanding your capabillities with it you should make sure it has PCI-E slots. The dual 2ghz and 2.5 ghz machines only have pci-x and some smaller ones only have pci slots. These are not compatible to the new products on the market. I believe the 2.3 + 2.7 duals and all quad machines have the pci-e slots but you may want to check this for future hardware upgrades.

“everything is broken”

[Mrvideo]

The only PCI-express were the G5’s sold first in late fall 2005. One model only before the MacPro. They consisted of 2.0 dual core, 2.3 dual core and 2.5 Quad core. All other models are either PCI or PCI-X.

As far as video cards go, there are still no aftermarket video cards for the PCI express G5 models to date.

[Rennie Klymyk]

[MrVideo] “The only PCI-express were the G5’s sold first in late fall 2005. One model only before the MacPro. They consisted of 2.0 dual core, 2.3 dual core and 2.5 Quad core. All other models are either PCI or PCI-X.”

Thanks for clarifying this.

[MrVideo] “As far as video cards go, there are still no aftermarket video cards for the PCI express G5 models to date”

Guess you mean Video Display cards, I have the DP 2GHZ with 3 pci-x slots and I’m miff’d because I can’t use the kona-3 Video Capture card with it (it’s pci-e only). I have to use the kona-2 or buy a new computer.

“everything is broken”