I’ve been in the process ,over the past few weeks… er, months… of changing the front room in my house into a gaming room / office. It’s a small room, I’d say maybe 12×12, but is lined up in just the right way to lay out things the way I want to. The old entertainment center and all the classic gaming consoles have found a new home there, as has a large table an a computer I’ve yet to write about but will get to soon – my Mac Pro.
A secondary spot in the room is devoted to a rotating slot of older computers. Well, that’s the idea at least – for the past month that table has just been holding a bunch of books and Commodore 64. I cleared off the C64 the other week only to shove more books on the table. Go figure.
Today I took the time to clear this table off and set up one of my favorite “obsolete” computers, the Power Mac G5. This is in preparation for a keyboard and mouse I have coming – a wired “Mighty Mouse” and the good old A1048 Keyboard – the same mouse and keyboard combination I use on my Mac Pro. I like the look and feel of them, so, hey, whatever works. Once I have those the setup will be functionally complete and good for whatever I want to use it for, which is nothing really.
Today was an “I’m not going to do anything” kind of day, so I figured I’d use the machine for a while. It’s been a month or so since I last fired it up, so why not? How about I spend a little while playing around with it? I used my Logitech K400 Plus keyboard (a wireless keyboard and track pad combo that I’d say a must have for most anyone who has multiple random machines) and went at it!
That “little while” was 2 hours. 2 solid hours of me using a 2 Ghz Dual-Core Power Mac G5 (The 2005 model). What did I do? A whole lot of nothing. I cued up episodes of King of the Hill from my media server (a Mac Mini, more to come on that in the future as well) and had them playing while I did some web browsing.
Of course that was via TenFourFox and so long as I stayed on more reasonable websites, things were fine. Facebook brings the machine to its knees, YouTube is damn near right out, and some other websites can be just as bad. Xadara isn’t bad by comparison, but I’d never publish from it – not since WordPress 5 and the Gutenberg editor.
Anyway, I didn’t do much for gaming. I couldn’t find my Halo disc so that was out and I didn’t want to try to play anything else (and even then now that I think about it that would have been insane with a track pad) so that was really that. I took the time to update my Time Machine backup, for what that would be worth to me, and to double check just what I had installed on the machine, as well as stress test it.
I decided to do my preferred “let’s check that the G5 is okay and not overheating” by converting a video from the server in Handbrake. Not the most taxing process, but a real world one. I let it convert the video over a period of, oh, 45 minutes? Yeah, it’s slow, it’s a G5, which is kind of sad when you think about the power consumption (even though being the 2005 model it’s a bit more power efficient) but the test showed things held steady. Temperatures didn’t jump above 70 Celsius and the fans didn’t increase at all! Excellent. Best I can presume from feeling the side, as well, the “hidden” fan and the associated vents seem to be mostly clear. Again, that’s the best I can tell though, but that fan terrifies me given how important it is. Maybe more on that near the future
I also took the time to connect an old 500GB external Western Digital hard drive to the G5 because why not? It wasn’t doing anything else and it would do it well to get spun up every once in a while. Don’t quite know what I’ll actually use it for but hey, at least it’s there.
I’ve not mentioned the other components of the setup because they aren’t really that important — an old LC HP monitor with a few dead pixels which was, you guessed it, a thrifting fine, serves as the display and works as well as it needs to. The thing has DVI so there’s that! Some random speakers handle sound — not the best but nothing terrible. That’s really that, nothing else to speak about of importance.
It was fun using it for a while. Yeah, I wasn’t productive with it at all, but that’s fine. A G5 in 2019 is not a machine you would do anything other than some very special production work on and that’s not what I’m about. I have this machine to enjoy it for what it is — as a sample of the end of the glory days of the PowerPC architecture in general purpose computing. I own it to have fun with it. That simple.
More to come, as always.