Gonna have nothing to spend my money on so I was thinking of investing in a second hand PowerMac to fiddle about in and maybe edit some videos on (I'm impressed with their virtual real-time effect processing in iMovie and stuff). I was thinking of an Apple Mac Mini, but their HDD issues seem very prevolent, I'm not really bothered about size, and the price to performance ratio seems quite dire. I was looking on ebay and saw PowerMac G4 AGP's. They seem quite upgradeable and run on virtually the same hardware as a PC (IDE bus, SD-RAM, AGP albeit mac cards). I was thinking for light video use it would make more sense to upgrade the G4 to about 800MHz, shove in a Radeon to support Quartz in OS X and up the ram to a gigabyte? Or maybe even buy a B&W G3? What do you guys think?
What do you mean upgrade the G4 to about 800mhz - you know you can't upgrade it like a PC right? As for the hard disk issues on the mac mini - there arent any issues as the standard one works perfectly fine. Its just for crazy people that think they need their Mac even faster. They work great as is How much are you looking at spending?
Hopefully little more than £300 as it's only really going to be a bit of a dossing machine. Don't worry, I've done my research about upgrading. It is possible to upgrade them via 3rd party processors - Sonnet etc offer 800MHz upgrade chips.
Hah - I was about to post that after buying a power mac and upgrading it you'd probably have spent over what a mini costs
I'd say that you'd need to upgrade the Mini's RAM, I don't think 256MB is enough at all! But yeah, another vote to get a mini, rather than upgrade the PowerMac here! Rob