It's odd how ancient the PowerMac G5 seems - even the early Intel Mac Pros feel like they're from another era - yet the Xbox 360 seems like it's barely aged at all.
I have one of the very final Power Mac G5s, a dual-dual G5 970mp (which contrary to what one often reads on the internet, it wasn’t water-cooled, that was the top-of-the-line of the previous year’s lineup). It featured PCI-express and I’d stuffed it with oodles if ECC RAM, a FibreChannel interface, and an early SSD.
I have to disagree that this system feels in any way ‘ancient’. Honestly it feels more like science fiction, a professional, hefty, dependable machine as opposed to today’s consumer-orientated devices.
Yeah, a modern MacBookPro is probably faster. It certainly costs much less too. But... that was a workstation. I did science on it. Nowadays it’s one-size-fits-all and if for some reason it doesn’t fit you you’re shit out of luck.
I've thought about getting an older cheesegrater mac pro just to case mod it for a modern hackintosh... they're still going for a bit more than I'd care to spend just to rip the innards out and still have to put more parts to modify modern atx hardware into it.
I keep thinking about it all the same... my 4790k hackintosh is aging well, and when I upgrade later this year may find a new home for it in one of those cases.
I just got rid of a 2006 Mac Pro since I'm moving in a few months, but it was pretty great. There's a ton of aftermarket upgrades you can do and even mine, the oldest Intel model, could run El Cap. The subreddit /r/macpro has a ton of info and if you get a 4,1 or 5,1 it'll go up to 12 cores and run Mojave easily.
