eBay cheep G5 price question

[Sam3]

Regarding this thread http://forums.macresource.com/read/1/548658 Are these machines worth $325.00?

I tried bidding on a couple, one for me, one for my sister-in-laws family, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to go over $300. The morning three went easily over $300, one of those for $325. Next batch ends this afternoon.

[The Grim Ninja]

Like I said in the thread, they had been selling for $600 just a few weeks/months ago.

The prices will go back up, probably to $450-550.

But, since this seller is constantly listing more, you could probably wait it out and save another $50 vs the ones that ended this morning. Just be sure to keep an eye out on how many he has listed, don't get caught waiting if he's reached his last. (note, he has been doing 3 day listings).

[MacArtist]

Not too long ago, the single processor G5s would fetch almost $500-600.

Lately, I have seen some price erosion in the G5s. I bought my wife a Dual G5 1.8 for $500.

I think the single G5s would be a decent buy at $300-$450. Much higher then you are in the price range for a Dual G5. If you get above $500; you are getting in the range for a used Intel powered iMac.

The key is to not lose your head.

We still have a lot of PPC software and my girls still need to run OS 9 software. Buying G5s for them made sense to me.

[incognegro]

i bet if you snagged one for 250 you could flip it for 350 in the right market.

[Sam3]

[quote MacArtist]...We still have a lot of PPC software and my girls still need to run OS 9 software. Buying G5s for them made sense to me.
That's one reason why I'm looking at this. I have some older children's software for my 5 year old. She's using an iMac 266, but I'd like her to do more, like use Tux Paint, but that requires OS X and I don't think OS X will work too well on that machine.

My thought is to either get my sister-in-law a newer G5 or give her my upgraded Sawtooth, they currently have a 700mhz eMac. Then have my daughter use the eMac, and I would replace my upgraded Sawtooth with a G5.

I'd like to upgrade to a current Intel machine, but can't afford it. This looks like a decent stop-gap machine that would get me a few more years.

I'm assuming that the 1.6ghz G5 will be faster than the 1.2 ghz G4 upgrade card in a Sawtooth. Is that a valid assumption?

[incognegro]

Sam3,

I posted this link in the first G5 thread Grim started:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G5/G5_vsG4MDD_review.html

it compares an MDD G4 (faster than Sawtooth in terms of bus/ram speed) and the G5 1.6 is better than that. a few excerpts...

"The G5 1.6 has 512KB of internal L2 cache with no L3 cache. It does have however much faster and less congested bi-directional 800MHz system bus with a 6.4 GBps throughput, a major improvement over the 167MHz MaxBus G4 systems architecture with only 1.3 GBps throughput. ... Even without all the improvements inside the G5 system IBM PPC970 CPU, the faster system bus allows the processor to communicate more effectively with the other systems on the motherboard such as AGP and PCI cards, hard drives, external ports and most importantly main memory."

"The G5 1.6 supports a maximum of 4 GB of 333 MHz PC2700 DDR SDRAM"

(RAM & bus speed in the Sawtooth is 100 MHz)

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Can someone give some info on power use of a 1.6 GHz G5? Except for software compatibility, an Intel mini will be about as fast and use a lot less power (pretty much its only real plus in my opinion) than a G5 tower.

[freeradical]

If you need to run OS 9 progies, wouldn't a G4 MDD be faster since it can boot directly into OS 9?

[incognegro]

some MDDs cannot boot into OS 9.
for example, the 1.42 dual processor model, or any MDD with Firewire 800 built-in.

[Sam3]

Compared to Friday's and Saturday's listings, today's machines fetched a lot more money. And I didn't get one.

Time to follow tomorrows listings...

But then again, if Dual 1.8's are going for about $500, wouldn't that be a better machine for the price than a 1.6 at $300-$325?

With kids programs, I don't think speed should be an issue with the emulation. They are learning programs and I don't think they are that resource intensive.