5/3/2016 update
All three of my 2013 PowerMac G5 builds (red, white, and blue) are still working perfectly. All have been upgraded to 16 GBs RAM, all have been upgraded to two hard disk drives (main and clone), and two (my son Alex’s G5 Blue and my G5 Red) have been upgraded to 250 GB SSDs and Vantec USB sound cards. The same two (G5 Blue and G5 Red) have also been upgraded to dedicated video cards: G5 Blue has a Dell Nvidia GT640 and G5 Red has a PNY Nvidia GTX650.
My original G5 White, except for the memory and drive upgrades, remains much as it was when I originally built it in Feb. 2013. It is still using 10.8.5 Mountain Lion and HD 4000 graphics with the OS and all programs updated as much as is possible.
Alex’s G5 Blue and my G5 Red are our main computers, and both are running El Capitan 10.11.4 with the Clover bootloader.
Finally, I upgraded G5 Red’s i3 4340 CPU with a Xeon E3 1241 V3 (which cost me less than an i5) in April, and I'm very pleased with the results. In fact, El Cap thinks the Xeon is an i7.
The only issue my G5 has with El Cap is that it sometimes wakes from sleep having lost its video synchronization. The workaround is to turn the monitor off then back on again and all is well. [The fix was to connect the PowerMac and monitor with an HDMI cable. No more snow when waking from sleep.] Other than that, El Cap solved all the issues I was having with Yosemite and I like it a lot.
Alex's G5 has no issues.
I should note that a Skylake version of my original G5 build can still be built for around $420:
Parts
- Intel Core i3-6100 $110 (3.7GHz, HD 350 graphics)
- Gigabyte GA-B150M-DS3H $50 when purchased with i3-6100 at MicroCenter
- 2 x 4GB Crucial Ballistic DDR4-2400 $37
- 1 TB WD Blue SATA hard drive $45
- Corsair CX430 power supply $55
- LG 24X SATA DVD-RW $15
- Lamptron 3mm blue LED with tail $2
- StarTech front bezel wire kit (used for front panel) $6
- Homebuilt Airport WiFi adapter <$20
- Used PowerMac G5 case about $50
- Apple USB keyboard $20 from Ebay
- Apple USB mouse $10 from Ebay
Tom