Maximum PC Dual Processor Showdown!
I am the official mac zealot at my company. Some anonymous person here placed a photocopied article from the March 2003 issue of Maximum PC on my desk while I was away. It is a pretty scary article. Well scary for me since my IT guy here (who controls the purchasing of any and all tech) has threatened to replace our macs with peecees. Anyway back to the article.
Scroll to the bottom of this link and one of the posts has the entire article:
http://www.xforums.net/Forum4/HTML/000073.html
Is the 970 supposed to make that big of a leap that our macs could compete with the dual Xeon machine. God, I hope so...
I am not trolling. Those numbers are just pretty hard to argue with. I have threatened to quit if they take my mac away.
Scroll to the bottom of this link and one of the posts has the entire article:
http://www.xforums.net/Forum4/HTML/000073.html
Is the 970 supposed to make that big of a leap that our macs could compete with the dual Xeon machine. God, I hope so...
I am not trolling. Those numbers are just pretty hard to argue with. I have threatened to quit if they take my mac away.

Comments
What do you do?
Just FYI.
The 1.2 GHz 970 would double (or cut by one half) each of those scores in the referenced article, which brings the Mac within striking distance...nevermind the fact it will debut faster than 1.2, at 1.4, and top at 1.8. The end of June couldn't come faster!
I hope that the 970 is all that we hope it is. I just can't wait to have some power specs back on our side.
Originally posted by T'hain Esh Kelch
I say our FSB is the main reason.. Give me a 2x2.0 Ghz G4 on a 533 Mhz FSB and it'll scream...
oh god yes, FSB at this point is the slowest part of the current macs and it really limits the processor
Originally posted by chilleymac
I am the creative director/ Prepress manager at a printing company.
I hope that the 970 is all that we hope it is. I just can't wait to have some power specs back on our side.
The 970 will indeed have a sickeningly fast integer unit, and it doesn't take much to beat the x86 in FPU. By why you'll need all that power for prepress I'll have no idea.
Originally posted by T'hain Esh Kelch
I say our FSB is the main reason.. Give me a 2x2.0 Ghz G4 on a 533 Mhz FSB and it'll scream...
Yes of course the G4 is only a 7 Pipe Cpu. I think FSB has to make a big difference as well but it still would have a hard time beating a 970 at the same clock.
At any rate I'm ready for a new shiny processor.
Nick
Originally posted by Splinemodel
By why you'll need all that power for prepress I'll have no idea.
Aqua?
Originally posted by bunge
Aqua?
(1) Quark Xpress isn't even OS X native at this point, and I don't think a lot of the stuff in the prepress world is.
(2) Quartz Extreme makes Aqua fast
As far as I can tell, a 1Ghz G4 with a Radeon 9000 is more than enough for doing publishing work. (And yes, I am quite familiar with publishing)
jeez.
IMO the things that are gonna determine the speed of the future computers will be:-
FSB
Memory
HD (Bring on 4Gbit SATA)
PCI bus (Bring on the next gen of PCI)
Originally posted by Stoo
I may be preaching to the choir, but why should the tech. support department determine which tools you get to use?
unfortunately, many companies are like that..
where I work, since the it manager is a big dell fan(yes, DELL FAN, he loves them, I keep goofing on em, especially when he gets his new dell every few months with these cool new features, like "wireless networking" and dvd burner..ooh(anyways)... most IT people seem to me mindless zombies that love microsoft and cheapo pc companies.
Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R
bunge was being humorous.
jeez.
Yes I was, thanks for the backup.