Terra Soft will soon start selling IBM's PowerPC 970FX Evaluation
board in their webshop. Is this the first non-apple G5 motherboard
made publically available? Quite interesting IMHO, although it's an
evaluation board ...

Link here!

(However, I don't thinkt that 1 April is a good day for press releases )

And it'll only cost you $4500 for the motherboard.

Motorola's G4 Sandpoint systems cost much the same but come with a full system, too.

The Pegasos II is still a more useful starting point for PowerPC development. You could quite easily say that $4500 for the privilege of a motherboard for development purposes is asking too much of many potential customers.

When you can ship them a system that costs the same as a fairly ordinary high-spec PC, rather than the same as a small car, the market can grow as a result both in terms of developers *AND* end user consumers.

I don't see what's so exciting about evaluation boards anyway. The TerraSoft system is pretty boring to anyone who isn't going to be buying tens of thousands of G5 processors in the next 6 months.

Neko

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Is it? What's about the board by Momentum (www.970eval.com)?

At least both are uninetersting for me personally, since I am not in an appropriate business to have a good benefit from such products...

I would buy a Power Mac G5 in this case...custom G5 mobos are still very expensive, maybe after a year or something.

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Undoubtful it will be very expensive. Pretty much out of reach for a normal mortal. But I didn't find any price information on their site ...?

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It was a *question* from my side!

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That motherboard was designed for IBM. This could be the very same board for what I know ...

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IMO, Apple is hardly known for competing through prices. Except for some low budget models they are quite notorious for their expensive products. But they are into prestige and status, and one must also remember that the hardware comes with the OS.

This dual G5 will most certainly be very expensive for a common low-price x86 user but it could still be cheaper than Apples top-of-the-line dual G5 ...

If it is even slightly similar to the www.970eval.com board (or the same one..) it will cost that much for the "netboot" system.

And then $1500 more for a disk and a case :D

Okay so it looks pretty full-featured (solid state disk, lots of ethernet, couple of utility ports like USB) from a certain point of view, it is also super-complex from a desktop point of view (a PPC450-class CPU just to initialise the system? :)

It's not going to knock a hole in Apple's business, and not going to sell in great quantities unless it's seriously cost-reduced (which it could be if they produced them in 1000s)

well takemehomegrandma that myth apple trying to stop..look at the
apple's store G5 begins from 1799$.

The Terrasoft board and the 970eval one is the same. The Terrasoft product page has a link to it.

Hmm what could you run on something like that? I could only think of linux? In that case the Pegasos is a much better deal! Sure we dont have G5 processors yet, but its only a matter of time. If the platform keeps moving up the way it is. At $4500 I would rather have a MAc G5 system and not just a motherboard.

curious what these (discovery III) boards cost

http://www.momentum-cpu.com/products/puma-cgx.html

Edited by Falcon1 to correct URL