It depends on the kind of tapeless you mean.
I have a G5 that is just a tich younger than yours, and I would not want to deal with ingesting AVCHD footage on that machine, but P2 media and XDCam (both from the full-size cameras and the EX-models) so far have been working out pretty well. I also wouldn't want to have to do anything involving transcoding HDV on the G5, for that matter.
My system is running Tiger (OS 10.5.6) and FCS 2 (incl. FCP 6.0.6) on a dual 2GHz G5 with 3.5 GB RAM, for the record. I use a Sonnet 500P eSATA RAID with Hitachi SATA drives for storage. I monitor via a Blackmagic card to a Sony CRT with an HD-SDI board.
There's far more P2 work happening in my area, though. I can't say I've done an intensive XDCam project on this system to give a fully-formed opinion. The little thing I did worked out fine. But I wasn't tracking an entire doc. It was a little PSA.
I have a Mac Book Pro that I've used to ingest and transcode AVCHD for a project that I am now editing on the G5. That actually worked out pretty slick.
I do a lot of my work in ProRes, and it behaves most of the time. It's a mighty slow render, however. I do a lot of my processing on the MBP for sanity's sake. If it's going to take longer than 20-30 minutes on the G5, I move it to the MBP to render. Unless I can leave it run overnight or go take a lunch break or something.
I can tell when I'm reaching the outer edge of what my processor can handle, and it does happen reasonably often that I will be replacing my beloved G5 probably after NAB this year, however.
Cutting a doc is a different beast. You might not feel the performance drag as I do if you're mostly cutting and not compositing or finishing.
This is all FCP, by the way. I've done a few Motion projects, and the lack of speed really drags the process down.
deb
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