Intel Mini or G5 Powermac

gettayloredgettaylored
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi, first of all, just want to say hi seeing as this is my first post.



Right, i've got a question... i've got a web design project coming up and wanted to upgrade from my iMac G5 1.8ghz.



I don't have the money to buy a brand new Intel Powermac so was considering an older Powermac G5. I've seen dual G5's on ebay for around £600 pounds but i'm wondering if it would be better to go for a Core Duo Mac Mini?



I do a lot of web development PHP/HTML/SQL and some medium to heavy Photoshop work, basically i work with web page layouts with quite a few layers.



I already have a screen to use so it is just deciding which machine will be better...



If any of you guys could give me some pointers i'd really appreciate it.



Thanks

Andrew

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    futurepastnowfuturepastnow Posts: 1,772member
    The G5 can hold bigger, faster hard drives (two of them), as well as a few expansion slots. The mini will have more CPU power (and use a lot less electricity). Just depends on which is more important to you.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    backtomacbacktomac Posts: 4,579member
    This should help answer your question.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    I do web development and the Mac Mini wins hands down for one very important reason. I can launch Parallels in 5 seconds and test if a website looks and works ok in Internet Explorer even while running the website from OS X's built-in Apache webserver.



    It saves so much time. Not having to make sure it works in IE would save even more but it's just one of those necessary things.



    I don't do the page layout stuff though and the G5 would possibly have the edge due to the hard drives because the Adobe suite makes good use of your hard drives for paging. You can get round this using 7200 rpm drives in the Mini though and make sure to get 2GB Ram at least. Installation isn't the easiest thing if you aren't used to it due to the Mini design though, which leaves you paying Apple more than necessary for Ram.



    I wish computers were designed like the XBox where the hard drives just slot in at one end. I don't know why they have to seal the things in so tightly.
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