Xserve G5
Unlike it's little brother the Xserve G4 the Xserve G5 is a significant step up in capability and usefulness.
The unit I own is the fastest Xserve G5 model sold. The 2.3Ghz "Dual Processor" G5.
Unlike its "cheese grater sibling" the G5 Quad the DP Xserve is based on the older G5 lineage, featuring PCI-X rather than PCI-E slots. This significantly reduces its expandability as 64-bit PCI-X slots are limited to approximately 266MB/s of bandwidth, versus the 4GB/s of a PCI-E 1.0 16x slot in the G5 Quad.
This limitation means we're stuck with only gigabit ethernet rather than the 10G of the Quad. We also only get two PCI-X slots in total instead of three. Of which at least one requires a video card to be installed to operate the unit (unless remote administration tools are installed)
Another limitation (correction?) despite what EveryMac claims, the unit is not capable of 16GB of memory. Only 8GB can be installed (I learned this the hard way!)
At present the G5 is paired with a 120GB SATA disk with OS X 10.5.9 "Sorbet" Leopard. However at time of writing the machine is currently unused, pending decisions about what tasks to run on it
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