Selling old Mac's
Discussion
You could try these guys www.macwonga.com Got shot of my old G5 which was gathering dust after upgrading to a Mac Pro. Got an alright price and they picked it up, so no faffing about.
Edited by TVR Tommy on Thursday 25th March 19:43
TVR Tommy said:
You could try these guys www.macwonga.com Got shot of my old G5 which was gathering dust after upgrading to a Mac Pro. Got an alright price and they picked it up, so no faffing about.
Well I'm trying to sell my old monster G5 Quad, and their website reckons £285. Edited by TVR Tommy on Thursday 25th March 19:43
I don't think so - I'm normally generous with prices when selling my old Apple gear, but the G5 Quad was the fastest of the last of the PPC boxes - any firm still needing the Classic OS (like any DTP / graphics firm that is *still* using Quark etc. - not many left now) and especially any business / academic setup that has *seriously* invested in really optimised Altivec code will want a Quad.
Back before the Seti@Home engine was ported to graphics card GPUs, my G5 Quad was #1 in the WORLD at seti@home recent average credit - beating full-on supercomputers and any Intel / AMD machine. Optimised for vector processing, you see.
Of course, the Intels wipe the floor with the G5 now - a good few years make a lot of difference (and in reality, in unoptimised code, my very first Core Duo Macbook Pro was very nearly as fast as the Quad G5 - the Core 2 Duos blew it away). But some firms and universities spent a LOT of time writing handcrafted Altivec code - and that still runs very, very fast indeed on the old G5s. And the Quad is the daddy.
To be honest, if it didn't make such a f
king racket I'd keep it, like my Cube, as the last of its generation. But it sucks something fking mental like 1.5 kW when flat out, and at idle it makes more fan noise than all my other 11 Macs put together. And no, I'm not joking about the power consumption - the G5 Quad isn't fitted with a 'standard' kettle lead like most computers, it has the next size up because of the current requirements...And yet, even with liquid cooling, the northbridge runs at more than 120 degrees Celsius (yes, you read that right) when flat out on optimised code, and the CPUs sit at 95 degrees (hotter than this and the system halts to protect itself. Nobody seems to have told the northbridge. And Apple designed that bit, and by all accounts did a lousy job).
Looking back, with an identical-looking aluminium box under my desk with air cooling, fans never above idle even with all *8* cores maxed out, and Intel 8-core power that blows my old G5 away without trying (memory bandwidth is silly - Xeons and FB-DIMMs), it's clear that the G5 Quad was a last-ditch attempt to compete with Intel's massive advances - but Apple didn't want to pay IBM for any R&D on the PowerPC. It's a better design - and with the right amount of money spent on it (think how much Intel spend on R&D) it would easily have been able to compete - especially on media workloads that pro Mac boxes tend to work with. But the G5 Quad was a bunch of server chips, overclocked to buggery, then resorted to bloody *liquid* cooling to tame the heat output, cost more than £4500, and stretched *way* beyond its limits.
I still like it for what it is though. But it's worth more than £285. If anyone here has an Altivec workload and needs the fastest PPC Mac available, I've got one for sale...
The site offer I got was a bit of a joke. But I gave them a ring and got a lot better price for my G5. There excuse was it was a new site and was having teething problems or some such.
The old G5 PPC had horrendous fan hum didn't they. Apple has lost some component quality in there resent machines. Lot's of problems with dry joints on the memory bus controllers. Or better still the leaking water coolers, which fry the processors. The most annoying thing with my early G5 was the horrific white noise you got when amplifying the analog sound output. My current Macbook pro also suffers from it. Only fixed by amplifying the digital optical signal.
But I still keep on going back. When they get it right they can't be beaten in my eyes.
The old G5 PPC had horrendous fan hum didn't they. Apple has lost some component quality in there resent machines. Lot's of problems with dry joints on the memory bus controllers. Or better still the leaking water coolers, which fry the processors. The most annoying thing with my early G5 was the horrific white noise you got when amplifying the analog sound output. My current Macbook pro also suffers from it. Only fixed by amplifying the digital optical signal.
But I still keep on going back. When they get it right they can't be beaten in my eyes.
TVR Tommy said:
The site offer I got was a bit of a joke. But I gave them a ring and got a lot better price for my G5. There excuse was it was a new site and was having teething problems or some such.
The old G5 PPC had horrendous fan hum didn't they. Apple has lost some component quality in there resent machines. Lot's of problems with dry joints on the memory bus controllers. Or better still the leaking water coolers, which fry the processors. The most annoying thing with my early G5 was the horrific white noise you got when amplifying the analog sound output. My current Macbook pro also suffers from it. Only fixed by amplifying the digital optical signal.
But I still keep on going back. When they get it right they can't be beaten in my eyes.
Agree completely with your last sentence. Being the compulsive early-adopter, naturally I had one of the first Intel Macs in the country (the first Macbook Pro, which ended up being delivered with higher clockspeed CPUs than first advertised), and the build quality compared to my existing G4 Powerbook was appalling. It overheated under any load (it was one of the first batch with duff heatpipes and crazy over-application of thermal compound) and the optical drive was misaligned in the case and destroyed any DVD you put in there. I jumped off the MBP bandwagon for a while, and used black Macbooks instead - the chipset being identical apart from a discrete GPU, which I don't use in my line of work. I went through two Macbook Airs trying to recapture the brilliance that was the 12" Powerbook (one of Apple's all time great machines - they got everything right with that one). Apple finally got there with the current model 13" Macbook Pro. It takes 8 GB of RAM, has a fast dual-core CPU, and with my trusty Intel 160 GB SSD instead of the mechanical disc it came supplied with, it's the fastest laptop I've ever owned. It is insanely fast, but nearly as compact as the awesome 12" Powerbook. And the multitouch trackpad is sheer brilliance.The old G5 PPC had horrendous fan hum didn't they. Apple has lost some component quality in there resent machines. Lot's of problems with dry joints on the memory bus controllers. Or better still the leaking water coolers, which fry the processors. The most annoying thing with my early G5 was the horrific white noise you got when amplifying the analog sound output. My current Macbook pro also suffers from it. Only fixed by amplifying the digital optical signal.
But I still keep on going back. When they get it right they can't be beaten in my eyes.
The Mac Pro got it all right too. After all the effort put into the industrial design of the G5 Powermacs, in order to efficiently shift LOADS of air as quietly as possible (because of the preposterous thermal loads from the overclocked G5s), putting Intel chipsets in them was cool (literally as well as figuratively). My Mac Pro doesn't run its fans above idle even with all 8 cores maxed out - that's 600 rpm for the exhaust fan, 500 rpm for the CPU and RAM fan, and 800 rpm for the PCIe slots. It's silent, but it's a bloody fast machine.
I have a feeling that I won't be spending money on Apple kit for a good few years now. I always regretted selling the 12" Powerbook, but I really *did* need higher performance. The 13" Macbook Pro is the spiritual successor to the 12" Powerbook and I love it - but it's also so damn quick with 8 GB of RAM, 64 bit CPUs and 64 bit OS, a reasonable GPU and *that* SSD, I can't see that I'd need to upgrade it or swap it for *anything* in the near future. It's just about perfect. Likewise the Mac Pro - mine is a 2008 model so already 'obsolete' - but it's got 8 Xeon cores running at 2.8 GHz, and 10 GB of fast RAM, and a bunch of Intel SSDs. It's faster than I need for anything I do, and that includes big fixed income risk attributions. I've recently bought a new graphics card for it (the original was very anaemic, typical Apple) and that's the only component I'll need to upgrade for years now. Maybe faster, bigger SSDs and some more RAM. But the system itself? It's got many years left in it.
And when Apple get it right, their kit is incredibly reliable. I've got a Titanium Powerbook that's still running 24x7 - it's only started to get flaky this year (the Wifi card is an old 802.11b unit (the 'original Airport' card) that doesn't do WPA, so I had to resort to using an external USB Wifi stick) but it still lasts a couple of hours on its original battery - this is an 8 year old laptop. And my Cube is still running 24x7 too - though that has required a few replacement parts, but I'll never let it die.
Used www.macwonga.com this week, got really good service when trading in my 2 old powerbook G4's Easy Cash !
Good guys to deal with - much better than using Flea bay
Good guys to deal with - much better than using Flea bay
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