About Testing the G5…
My wife and I made it up to the Apple store yesterday and got to play around with the G5. They had a 1. 6GHZ machine and a 1.8Ghz side by side, which made it easy to run tests and get a feel for a comparison between the two. I ran Cinebench 2003 on both machines and took some video of the 1.8 running Cinebench. I also re-ran tests on my other two PowerMacs and the AMD machine mainly for data consistency and to get the “formal” benchmarks, and some went up so ever very slightly and some went down. I’m in the process of updating the “shootout” article with the results. Additionally, I shot video of my dual 1.25 G4 and my AMD 2000+ running Cinebench and hope to have all the video posted on the site in the next few days. They will be clips about 30 seconds long and won’t show the entire Cinebench rendering tests but will include enough for you to see some visually evident differences.
I didn’t know if I’d really like the design of the G5, even though I had seen pictures of it. Having Firewire and USB ports on the front of the machine is especially nice. Admittedly, the store environment is not very quiet; but I put my ear up to the front grille of the G5 and could still barely hear it. Overall, we had a favorable impression of the design.
My wife did lament the machine’s capacity for only a single optical drive, which was kind of funny, because she’s a bigger Mac fan than I am and has lived that way for years. I reminded her that my Quicksilver held only one optical drive and my MDD Power Mac was an exception with two. I am more concerned with the G5’s ability to only hold two internal hard drives. That’s not a huge issue, but it does come into play when I’m looking at a machine to work video on. Yes, I can use Firewire 800 drives for additional storage; but that’s not the same as having extra hard drive carriers in the machine. Not only are internal hard drives still generally faster, but they don’t cost me an extra $100 per disk (or more) for an external drive case.
Is there a G5 in my future? At some point. Right now, paying off the debt I’ve already incurred switching to or equipping the household with Macs over the last couple of years takes priority. As I tell my wife, I never hurt myself by waiting, as much as Apple’s marketing department might not like to hear me say that. Sometimes there are opportunities you lose if you don’t seize them, and sometimes there are opportunities you can afford to pass up to wait for something better. This seems like one of the latter. I’m going to wait for the dual 2Ghz machine to come down in price or for Apple’s single processor 3Ghz model. Sooner or later, they or something like them will happen.
I didn’t know if I’d really like the design of the G5, even though I had seen pictures of it. Having Firewire and USB ports on the front of the machine is especially nice. Admittedly, the store environment is not very quiet; but I put my ear up to the front grille of the G5 and could still barely hear it. Overall, we had a favorable impression of the design.
My wife did lament the machine’s capacity for only a single optical drive, which was kind of funny, because she’s a bigger Mac fan than I am and has lived that way for years. I reminded her that my Quicksilver held only one optical drive and my MDD Power Mac was an exception with two. I am more concerned with the G5’s ability to only hold two internal hard drives. That’s not a huge issue, but it does come into play when I’m looking at a machine to work video on. Yes, I can use Firewire 800 drives for additional storage; but that’s not the same as having extra hard drive carriers in the machine. Not only are internal hard drives still generally faster, but they don’t cost me an extra $100 per disk (or more) for an external drive case.
Is there a G5 in my future? At some point. Right now, paying off the debt I’ve already incurred switching to or equipping the household with Macs over the last couple of years takes priority. As I tell my wife, I never hurt myself by waiting, as much as Apple’s marketing department might not like to hear me say that. Sometimes there are opportunities you lose if you don’t seize them, and sometimes there are opportunities you can afford to pass up to wait for something better. This seems like one of the latter. I’m going to wait for the dual 2Ghz machine to come down in price or for Apple’s single processor 3Ghz model. Sooner or later, they or something like them will happen.
posted by Andy Foster at
3:27 AM
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