Shiny new PCIe G5
I've just picked up a shiny 'new' PCIe G5 that was reduced at my local AppleCentre. I also ordered 8GB of Crucial memory, a couple of 250GB HDDs for a 500GB RAID-0 stripe set and there's a GeForce 6600 winging its way to me as well. The whole lot set me back about the same as a stock config. Mac Pro, but having used Mac Pros on a daily basis for the last few months I was gambling that this thing would be faster.
Boy, was I right!
I'm absolutely blown away by the speed of this thing. I suspect that a lot of it is down to having 8GB of RAM installed. I thought that it would be overkill but not so. Adobe CS2 absolutely flies on it. Whilst a Mac Pro would probably beat it in the raw speed stakes, this G5 has stamina. You can fully load it, and it'll keep thundering on at full speed long after a Mac Pro has become bogged down in swap-file hell. iMacs and MacBook Pros can't even touch it.
So chuffed, this is the best Mac I've bought in a long time - I'm already eyeing up a refurbished G5 Quad. I get the impression that this is how OS X is meant to be experienced...
Boy, was I right!
I'm absolutely blown away by the speed of this thing. I suspect that a lot of it is down to having 8GB of RAM installed. I thought that it would be overkill but not so. Adobe CS2 absolutely flies on it. Whilst a Mac Pro would probably beat it in the raw speed stakes, this G5 has stamina. You can fully load it, and it'll keep thundering on at full speed long after a Mac Pro has become bogged down in swap-file hell. iMacs and MacBook Pros can't even touch it.
So chuffed, this is the best Mac I've bought in a long time - I'm already eyeing up a refurbished G5 Quad. I get the impression that this is how OS X is meant to be experienced...
Comments
You can fully load it, and it'll keep thundering on at full speed long after a Mac Pro has become bogged down in swap-file hell.
I use a quad occasionally with 4GB Ram and I agree that it is one seriously fast machine and not just raw performance as you point out but throughput. It handles the highest bitrates with ease. However, I think saying a mac Pro is slower is incorrect. I imagine that if you increase the spec on a Mac Pro, it will be faster overall. The biggest problem with apps like Photoshop is not having universal binaries but if you compare CS3 beta on a Mac Pro with it on a G5 and then it would be a fair comparison.
Is it a quad? CS2 is native PPC, so yes it will fly on that machine.