questions about PowerMac G4 Dual 867
My name's Ryan and I'm new to this forum. I'm making the switch to Mac from PC around April of 2003 and I'm currently researching different systems. I'm a composer and I will continue to write music on my PC (software isn't cross platform), but I want to put together a design studio on the Mac for 2D & 3D graphic illustration and design combined with digital photography, for print.
Up until now I've only worked on a PC except limited use at work on a PowerMac G4 933(beautiful machine). My home PC I'm about ready to smash on the street in front of my house, it is so aggravating.
The PC I use at work is of higher caliber(1.5Ghz higher), but I still have to endure crashes, next to no plug-and-play ability, and frustrating errors (anyone really know what "You have performed an illegal operation" actually means?). All my Mac friends tell me to buy a Mac and the little bit of experience I'm gaining at work on OSX has been an eye opening experience so far.
I'm interested in the dual 867 with 133mhz system bus, 1Gb PC2100 DDR Ram, 60Gb ATA, Superdrive, and the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti/128Mb DDR graphics card, build to order, probably directly from the Canada Online Apple Store. For a display, I'm seriously considering either the Formac 1740OX or the Formac Gallery 2010.
I have a few questions concerning this system. I'll be running Adobe Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0, Acrobat 5, Corel Bryce 5, iPhoto, iDVD2, and occasionally iMovie2, as well as various shareware apps and plugins. I expect to have multiple programs open at once, possibly up to 3 or 4.
Does Mac OSX split up and allocate enough of the programs to utilize the full processing power of both processors?
Really, How good is the NVIDIA GeForce MX Titanium Video card? I've been reading through the forums a lot and these too topics have been mentioned quite often.
I've also heard a great deal of complaints about the new architecture, the slow system bus, the DDR not reaching its full potential, the Ram being limited in quantity, among other things. I'm assuming a lot of you own older Macs, I'm wondering if the new line isn't much better than the older models, and what I can expect performance wise. I'm not going to be performing complex rendering or be working with massive file sizes, but I do want a fast system that can be expanded over a few years. I'm actually hoping that by the time next April rolls around a new Mac will be out so maybe the price on this model will drop.
Any and All Help is Greatly Appreciated. Thanks. :cool:
Up until now I've only worked on a PC except limited use at work on a PowerMac G4 933(beautiful machine). My home PC I'm about ready to smash on the street in front of my house, it is so aggravating.
The PC I use at work is of higher caliber(1.5Ghz higher), but I still have to endure crashes, next to no plug-and-play ability, and frustrating errors (anyone really know what "You have performed an illegal operation" actually means?). All my Mac friends tell me to buy a Mac and the little bit of experience I'm gaining at work on OSX has been an eye opening experience so far.I'm interested in the dual 867 with 133mhz system bus, 1Gb PC2100 DDR Ram, 60Gb ATA, Superdrive, and the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti/128Mb DDR graphics card, build to order, probably directly from the Canada Online Apple Store. For a display, I'm seriously considering either the Formac 1740OX or the Formac Gallery 2010.
I have a few questions concerning this system. I'll be running Adobe Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0, Acrobat 5, Corel Bryce 5, iPhoto, iDVD2, and occasionally iMovie2, as well as various shareware apps and plugins. I expect to have multiple programs open at once, possibly up to 3 or 4.
Does Mac OSX split up and allocate enough of the programs to utilize the full processing power of both processors?
Really, How good is the NVIDIA GeForce MX Titanium Video card? I've been reading through the forums a lot and these too topics have been mentioned quite often.
I've also heard a great deal of complaints about the new architecture, the slow system bus, the DDR not reaching its full potential, the Ram being limited in quantity, among other things. I'm assuming a lot of you own older Macs, I'm wondering if the new line isn't much better than the older models, and what I can expect performance wise. I'm not going to be performing complex rendering or be working with massive file sizes, but I do want a fast system that can be expanded over a few years. I'm actually hoping that by the time next April rolls around a new Mac will be out so maybe the price on this model will drop.
Any and All Help is Greatly Appreciated. Thanks. :cool:
Comments
Honestly. Apple's current ultra-lame hardware offering (tm) isn't quite suiteable for PURE 3D stuff. Especially on rendering. Which Linux-based Athlon PCs rule.
You of course can build models and scenes on the Mac. But for rendering PLEASE go for PC.
As for video card. I am using the current Apple hardware as "guide". Current PowerMac's lame system bus really limit the use of video card. You still can notice some difference on the OpenGL performance (on some 3D apps like Maya, Lightwave) between the cheapo card and the GeForce 4 Ti. But again due to the limited bus bandwidth the difference isn't that great compared to PC.
As for the application you are going to use. Also have to tell you the truth that almost all of them are NOT MP aware. iDVD is however. Photoshop's MP awareness is sucky at best.
So far as I know those MP aware apps that takes over 90% - 98% per CPU usage under the MP Macs are:
Lightwave
Cinema 4D
Maya 4.5
Sorenson 3
Cleaner 6
Final Cut Pro
Combustion
Shake 2.5
DVD Studio Pro
iDVD
Of courses MP machines are very good on running multiple apps even they aren't MP aware
As I have said before. You probably will see something better than the current machines at the time you make purchase.
[ 11-20-2002: Message edited by: Leonis ]</p>
The current system bus in the new PowerMac's is not really all that lame, well the 167MHz one at least. In some tasks I think that the 167 MHz bus would be preferable to a 2100 DDR solution on the PC. This being because memory to CPU latency will be reduced on the 167 MHz bus, while peak bus performance is going to be better on the 2100 DDR PC, it's hard to actually hit that peak. If you want to draw some of your own conclusions about this then you can read a very informative article over at <a href="http://arstechnica.com/paedia/b/bandwidth-latency/bandwidth-latency-1.html"; target="_blank">Ars Technica</a>.
Saying this I really do think it will be worth it for you to get at least the Dual 1 GHz, when you buy. Although come April I'm not even sure you will be able to find any of the current Powermacs in the retail channel because they will have been replaced by newer models.
I have one of the new Dual 1 GHz with 1.25 GB of RAM and the GeForce 4 Titanium card, so I can tell you from experience that they are really nice machines. Are they fast? Yes. Are they fast enough? No, but I've never used a computer that I thought was fast enough (funny thing really, the more computing power I get my hands on the more stuff I do that I just wouldn't have even thought about before).
The load balancing between the two CPU's is awesome. Unfortunately, not a lot of applications are heavily multithreaded for dual processors, so you may only see marginal performance gains from the second processor while running one process, but if you are running two processors you are really going to see a speed increase. This machine is my first dual CPU computer and I have to say that I never want to go back to a single processor; dualeys just rock for doing many tasks at once, of course I may be enticed to give up my dual CPU if a single CPU had simultaneous multithreading (Hyper-threading), but hey why not a dual CPU system with SMT.
The GeForce 4 Titanium card is really nice. Having 128 MB of video RAM is a big plus for running dual monitors, and the performance of the GF4Ti is noticeably better than the Radeon 9000 Pro that comes stock with the Powermacs.
You also have to remember that the new Powermacs do have DDR from the memory controller to the memory, so that the graphics card can access memory as fast as it could in a "full" DDR system, it's just the CPU's that can't achieve DDR peak throughput.
3D still remains faster on the PC then on the Mac by a significant margin. A high-end PC with my graphics card would get about double the frame rate in most games, (I get about 150 FPS in Quake3). I'm not sure why that is, it's most likely a combination of, slow FPU performance on the G4, non-SMP ready applications, memory performance, etc.
Well I guess I had a little more to add then what I thought.
I am interested in the dual 1Ghz machines but I figured they would be a bit too pricey for a first time switch to Mac, so I asked about the dual 867's. If you guys happen to know, how would both the dual 867's and the dual 1Ghz compare to a P4 2Ghz, if they all had 1GB ram, 60GB 7200 drive, and a Titanium Video card w/128Mb DDR? I use a P4 2Ghz at work for some side projects so I'm interested to know what kind of performance I can expect on the Macs compared to the Intel machine.
Thanks again for the help. :cool: