Heh heh... blatant title plagiarism!

Anyways, i've been looking into getting a mac for a while. Decided NOT to get a macbook when the laptop upgrade came around for financial reasons - I couldn't justify spending an extra thousand pounds on something that wouldn't let me play games, blu-ray and have a full HD screen.

However seeing as i've saved a lot of money from that, and I want to take the plunge into the macworld, i've decided that an older model would be a good start.

I've always secretly loved the G5 cases, so i've decided I want one of those based purely on aesthetics (hey it's a mac right?)

However i've found that there are a couple of things to look out for. I want this sort of interior --> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... 5_open.jpg as opposed to this interior --> http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/images ... en-600.jpg

Notice the difference - one has two wind-tunnelly looking things, the other has just one larger one.

Obviously i've never seen one of these things close up, and it's annoying that the one with the big ugly single sheet of something in there has a lovely black motherboard (according to the picture) but I just can't stand it. I love the look of the two fans and windtunnels.

So what model should I be looking at? And is there really much difference between Dual Processor and Dual Core? Bear in mind for the next 2 years I don't have to pay any electricity bills >.<

Bah, I looked into a G5, too expensive for me at the moment. So I'm "dipping my toes in" with a G4, if I like it I'll look to upgrade later (probably to a new Mac Mini, or an iMac at a stretch).

The side of that G5 looks fantastic, I can only advise if you're going on Fleabay like me that you either ask or look at the pictures.

Luckily I saved up quite a lot of money for my new laptop over the course of the year, only to find this fantastic Samsung laptop on special offer for just under £500! (16" widescreen, fully HD, blu-ray, 9200GS, 350GB HDD etc)

I've been looking on fleabay, it's all very confusing >.<

FWIW, you're in luck.

The one you don't like is the quad core model from '05 (going from the review on Ken Rockwell's site!).

The other one is a lowly dual proc. from the earlier runs. Hence it's cheaper.

Soo...

Dual proc or Dual core then?

=D

At a guess, depends what you want?

Not sure how Power works, but I'd guess that multi-cores would give you better speed, whereas multi-procs would get you more memory? Or perhaps it would get you a better management of memory?

That's correct.
I have the Quad G5 at home and that's the second image posted in the OP.
Any questions you need to ask about it I'd be more than willing to answer if I can, Angelic.

Mark

Just to add to the confusion, I have the dual processor and it is the same as the second picture. However, mine was a model only available for about three minutes before they brought out the dual core ones (dual 2.5GHz single core).

More info available here.

Aah righty.

So i'm going to want Dual-core for DDR2 and PCI-Express then?

I reckon i'll go for that. I'm not sure what i'm going to use the machine for seeing as I have a pretty nice Windows-based system already, but it's better to be safe I guess.. Ebay really isn't helpful with details though (many of the people selling don't seem to know what they have except for "it's a G5") so does anyone know anywhere that sells second-hand Macs? Google wasn't too helpful, I only found one place which charged the earth!

I've used these guys before:

http://www.scrumpymacs.co.uk/

Yeah, I've bought from Scrumpymacs too. Nice guys on the phone as well.
Had a mobo fault, IIRC, with the first MDD I bought from them, but it was all sorted quickly and for gratis.
www.lowendmac.com is also a good source of info on what the various models specs are.

Reading up from that lowendmac website, i've discovered that the Dual Processor is actually faster for everything except for gaming (which I won't be using it for).

I've basically got a choice between -->

2.2GHz Dual, 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD with a couple of little niggling inconsistencies in the description, such as 2GHz Dual processor named. For £435.

or

1.8GHz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD with what appears to be a decent sellers guarantee. For £337.25

I'm thinking that for £100 cheaper, the processor doesn't really matter! I mean, the RAM can be upgraded (and i'll be looking to have the max I can get, which IIRC is 6GB? Someone please correct me if i'm wrong!) so i'll need matched pairs anyway, which shouldn't cost too much considering RAM prices. And HDDs are dirt-cheap too, so I might just slap a 250GB in there for about £35.

Slower one sound good?

Bought it.

Then discovered how expensive DDR is as opposed to DDR2. Which is annoying.

Is 8GB worth it? There seems to be quite the price difference between 512MB sticks and 1GB sticks.

Which one did you go for in the end?

It really depends on what you're going to do with it.
Maxing out the RAM in anything is never a bad idea, but for day to day stuff, 4GB will be fine.
Worth going through Crucial for the RAM.

I went for the 1.8GHz one. Price was a major swaying point...

Might just buy 2GB of RAM for now, then wait a while until I need it. I doubt i'll be doing much intensive stuff on it, and if the Mac can't handle it then chances are my PC can.

DDR is so much more expensive than DDR2 though! I really can't get over that..