I ran a Power Mac 9600 as a server (NetBSD) for a good fifteen years. It started with the original 300 MHz PowerPC 604ev, then got a 700 MHz G4, then the fastes

I ran a Power Mac 9600 as a server (NetBSD) for a good fifteen years. It started with the original 300 MHz PowerPC 604ev, then got a 700 MHz G4, then the fastest 1 GHz G4 which I got when it went on sale for $99. It had the full 1.5 gigs of memory, which is crazy for a motherboard which came out in 1995. It's very interesting to see how the huge gulf between the CPU speed (1 GHz) and the memory bus speed (50 MHz) translates to real world speed. For certain workloads, the 2 megs of L3 cache makes a huge difference, because once outside of L3 cache, performance drops precipitously. Once I recap it, I'll still keep using it. It's amazing how usable such an old machine can be, and before requiring a recap, it was incredibly stable - it had uptimes of multiple years at a time. I'm looking forward to running it again. I like to imagine what things might be like if we cared about upgradability more these days. The closest is that I just replaced a four year old processor on an AMD motherboard and doubled the performance without increasing power usage. We need more of that!