The Power Macintosh G5 was introduced by Apple in 2004 as a replacement to its hugely successful G4 range of PowerMacs. Not only did the G5 PowerMac offer greater processing power than the G4 range, it also saw Apple move away from the curvy, case plastic cases that had been used for it’s pro range of desktops since the original blue and white PowerMac G3 of 1999.
Instead Apple introduced an anodized aluminum alloy case with a distinctive front grill – a design that is now somewhat cruelly referred to as being like a cheese grater. Despite this the ‘cheese grater’ case is still in use in the 2008 range of MacPros.
Although it was only around for 2 years, the PowerMac G5 range saw a number of revisions made to it’s processor, ranging from a single processor 1.6 GHz model through to the final 2.5 GHz Quad Core model – the most powerful of all Apple’s PowerPC based Macs.
My experience of using the PowerMac G5 has been positive, although it seems quite a bulky case it’s certainly not ugly. While it might not be able to keep up with the intel based PowerMacs it’s still a very capable machine and unlike previous PowerMacs it runs incredibly quiet.
All the PowerMac G5’s have easy to access internals making it relatively simple to add more RAM or bigger hard drives. Providing you have at least 2GB of RAM all of the G5 range should run Mac OS X Leopard with ease, later models (dual & quad cores) can be fitted with a massive 16GB of RAM!