EQMac.com

Yeah, I'd go with a late '05. And $600 is too much even for one of those, let alone an early '05. That ad inflates the price by lumping in all that software which, although kinda nice if you do design work, is pretty worthless without the install discs.

I'd shoot for the $3-400 range for a late '05 G5 in good condition. You can probably do better with local sellers, though, since you have the Boston craigslist market at your fingertips.

Also I wouldn't worry too much about the video card or RAM - the former seems largely irrelevant and the latter is cheap and easy to upgrade. PowerPC processor speed is where it's at, for EQ Mac performance.

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Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

So instead of a g5 quad would the g5 2.7ghz dual core be as good? It seems to be cheaper on average anyway in my search.

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There isn't a huge difference between the June 2004 dual 2.0/2.3 vs the late 2005 dual/quads besides price and AGP vs PCI-e.

June 2004 - $400 after all upgrades including video card
PPC Dual Core 2.0 / 2.3
AGP 8x (ATI Radeon 9800xt 256gb)
8gb mem max

Late 2005 - $600-800 after upgrades
PPC Dual Core 2.3 / 2.7 or Quad
PCI-e
16gb mem max

Believe me when I say, functionally, the difference between the two is negligible when comparing them for use with EQ. Both of them can six box much easier than a current gen Intel iMac/Mac Pro because of the native PPC code. If you want to spend double the money for a smidge better performance, it's your money!

edit: Added links to both units for comparison. If you can get the late 2005 cheaper or equivalent to the 2004, do it. If not, go for the 2004 since they're usually cheaper. In any case, if you're only doing two-three boxing, both of these machines will rip EQs face off and s* it back down it's throat.

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Ranejaa (rng), Vladd (nec), Shamz (shm), Zemos (sk)
Creamyranch (war), Honeyfrench (clr), Roastedgarlic (mnk)
Sundriedtomato (brd), Bluecheese (rog), Parmesan (bst)

Thanks Dimitre,
I'm definitely looking to spend less money. I just want to be sure I can 3 box flawlessly. My 2010 Mac mini 2 boxes well but I found adding a 3rd box makes it a bit laggy. As long as the 2004 2.0/2.3 can handle 3 boxing with ease I'm going to go with that.

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Yeah, you definitely don't need a Quad to 3-box. I 4-box smoothly on a late '05 dual core 2.3 GHz with 2.5 GB of RAM and a GeForce 6600. I'm running Tiger (a bit more streamlined than Leopard) and play with old models, no spell effects, and so on.

Just to clarify, the late '05 line wasn't this:

but rather dual core 2.0 / 2.3 or Quad. The only dual 2.7 GHz was an early '05 speedbump with dual processors.

This makes shopping for G5 towers a little more difficult, since the '04 line has dual processor 2.0 and 2.3 GHz models, while the late '05 line has dual core 2.0 and 2.3 GHz models. The late '05 models have the other speedbump upgrades that Dimitre mentioned, so if you get some information from the seller about bus speed, max RAM upgradability, etc then you can pretty easily figure out which vintage tower you're looking at.

Really though it shouldn't matter too much. Dimitre's definitely right about the faceripping and throat$hitting.

P.S. the wiki page on G5 towers is a good starting point for spec comparisons. If you want to dig deeper I'd check out the Apple pages.

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Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

I currently have:

2010 Quad i5 27" iMac (5 box without lag)
2004 Dual 2.0 G5 Power Mac (6 box without lag)
2003 1.5 G4 iMac (2 box without lag)

For sheer power for EQ, I use the G5. For everything else I use the iMac. Also, the iMac is pretty

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Ranejaa (rng), Vladd (nec), Shamz (shm), Zemos (sk)
Creamyranch (war), Honeyfrench (clr), Roastedgarlic (mnk)
Sundriedtomato (brd), Bluecheese (rog), Parmesan (bst)

haha yeah G5 towers are huge and heavy and loud. definitely not the modern/slim/sexy Apple aesthetic. caveat emptor

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Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

If one were to buy a laptop that wanted the best possible eqmac performance, wouldn't they buy this: http://cgi.ebay.com/Powerbook-G4-Alumin ... _506wt_885

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IIRC the "Late 2005" also had a huge bump in processor cache which makes them significantly better performance wise, even if their clock speeds don't seem like that much of an increase.

Another thing to note is that graphics cards other than were in existence when EQMac was last updated will have little or no performance boost over the 128/256 card found in the last G4 towers. It was discovered rather recently that all the TNL and Vertex work is being passed off to a software renderer for almost all cards since they are not on a hard coded list embedded into the eq client... I wish we had some more testing on how much impact this has, but I suspect that unless you have one of those cards your CPUs are doing almost all the graphics work.

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I had this exact same setup and could 2 box but it wasn't great.

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I had a very similar set up- that was my very first Mac.. for 2 boxing. Needless to say it's my wife's now! It ran hot. (also had fan issues but thats separate)

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I'm going to throw my two cents in.

I have two machines I use. My "old" desktop is an early but well configured G5 quad with Leopard. This is what I used until recently when my company bought...

Brand new, very well configured 27-inch iMacs. 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7, 12 GB memory. Snow Leopard.

The old G5 ran very well. However, I now sorta hate it for tradeskilling compared to the new iMac. With the G5, there's a slight but detectable (and annoying) mouse lag when tradeskilling. The issue is aggravated when I have more bags open.

The iMac doesn't do it, even if I ghetto box a trader on the second screen. And the iMac has the 27-inch screen attached to it while I've got a crappy 17-inch Mac display attached to the old desktop.

I'm not running PowerOfTwo or done any of that type of tweaking for display. No viewport or anything like that (except on the trader).

This begs the question: are the very latest and fastest Intel Macs now so much faster than the old G4s and G5s that they are better at running EQ?

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Sinnder, Enchanter of Destiny
Joshore, Druid of Destiny

I have a hackintosh of the same build there and it does seem to work very well. I only have a G4 to compare to so it isn't fair but it's faster than my laptop hackintosh which specs out like an early 2009 MBP.

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Crickett & Sprint

Generally no, but it is getting close.

Note that the G4's, yep newer machines will outperform them.

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I am looking at buying this for about $200:

Power Mac G5 A1047
CPU: 2.5 Ghz
Ram: 8 GB
HDD: 500 GB
VGA: ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256 MB
OS: leopard 10.5.8

Based on one of the posts, this should be able to box 6 toons without much lag (on a good connetion), correct?