iMac Intel and iMac G5 boot times

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Some guys did some tests, they bought two new iMacs, an iMac G5 and an iMac Intel and they powered them on at the same time to compare the times.



Apparently, the Intel iMac beat the G5 iMac by a wide margin. I timed it around 90 seconds for the G5 and around 40 seconds for the Intel iMac.



Very interesting stuff.



Link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 15
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gene Clean

    Some guys did some tests, they bought two new iMacs, an iMac G5 and an iMac Intel and they powered them on at the same time to compare the times.



    Apparently, the Intel iMac beat the G5 iMac by a wide margin. I timed it around 90 seconds for the G5 and around 40 seconds for the Intel iMac.



    Very interesting stuff.



    Link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ




    There is definitely somthing wrong with that iMac G5 !



    My 1.8Ghz iMac G5 (1GB/80GB/10.4.4) takes 45 seconds from the press of the powerbutton to the appearance of the Finder desktop.
  • Reply 2 of 15
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by WebFlits

    There is definitely somthing wrong with that iMac G5 !





    And probably with the Intel one too. I remember a MacNN discussion where reportedly, the new Inetl iMac boots to the login screen in 17-18 seconds.
  • Reply 3 of 15
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    I can confirm that the new iMac boots surprisingly quickly. We restarted iMacs at Macworld several times, accidentally of course. Don't have any exact figures as I spent most of my time analyzing the MacBooks.
  • Reply 4 of 15
    Even my iBook G4 1.2 ghz boots faster than that iMac G5!
  • Reply 5 of 15
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    heh. bollocks to that iMac g5 (the one in the video), it's probably running some startup disk-checking script or something. that said, it appears that iMac core duo generally boots up faster than the latest iMac g5.
  • Reply 6 of 15
    Quote:

    Originally posted by sunilraman

    heh. bollocks to that iMac g5, it's probably running some startup disk-checking script or something. that said, it appears that iMac core duo generally boots up faster than the latest iMac g5.



    We reported those under-20-second intel boot times from chime to login window though. It's more than that if you go straight to the desktop, and more still if you measure from power-on. Login window is one way to help limit login items changing from machine to machine for better consistency.
  • Reply 7 of 15
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    cool. what i meant is... in general, based on several reports around the web, that bootup is faster on the intel imac.



    you do have a good point ciparis that as more data becomes available one should look at specifics of how they measured bootup time. i feel "from pressing the power on button to login window" is the most useful measurement at this stage. anything within 30secs for that measurement would be really, quite good.
  • Reply 8 of 15
    Well it ought to be faster with twice as many cores, faster memory, a lower latency memory controller, and who knows what else is newer. The real question is: Does anybody actually ever reboot their Mac anymore?
  • Reply 9 of 15
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Programmer

    The real question is: Does anybody actually ever reboot their Mac anymore?



    That's a good question and we know the answer for people like us in this forum. However, there are at times some articles in popular Mac sites, pretending that the power figures that Apple provides for sleep mode in Macs are misleading, and that actual power consumption is far more high while in sleep. I am not debating if this true or not, but I guess that many people reading these sites would shutdown their machines when they are not in use.
  • Reply 10 of 15
    icfireballicfireball Posts: 2,594member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Programmer

    The real question is: Does anybody actually ever reboot their Mac anymore?



    Yes. I for one do...for multiple reasons. 1) Less wear and tear on the hard drive, fans, processor, etc. 2) My G5 starts up very quickly; I see no reason to not shut it down if I won't be using it for a few hours.
  • Reply 11 of 15
    fishafisha Posts: 126member
    the initial spin up of an HDD places the most stress on the HDD. The initial motor currents needed are way higher than the normal operating current to keep it running at full speed. In fact when in the HDD testing rooms i used to work in, the RAID controller cards would only spin up 2 out of the 14 drives in the array at any single one time in order to limit the current through the array's planar board.



    It could also be argued that the thermal stress of heating up and cooling through running and not running could place more stress on the mechanical components too comapred to a steady running temp.





    that being said, those sorts of stresses are more likely to cause problems through constant cycling of on and off rather than a few hours on, a few hours off.





    Personally, I dont see the need for a full shutdown compared to a sleep mode ( surely apples spin down the drives in sleep mode? ) if all the components are wound down to stop.
  • Reply 12 of 15
    I timed my iMac G5 last night. It's the 2.1GHz Front Row model.



    About 45 seconds. Once it gets to the login screen, it's very fast to get into the OS. Probably 3-5 seconds. I will note also that I have 2.5GB of RAM, which takes extra time to verfiy at startup.
  • Reply 13 of 15
    I have both 20"/2.0ghz/1gig ram G5 and same in intel.

    Boot times with exactly the same software, music, photos, desktop picture and all was just about exactly the same. In fact the first time the G5 was faster as it got the network connection first and the intel had to take another name - when I switched names, it was about the same. - Oh, My tests were from button push to the system fully loaded and to the desktop.



    Boot times don't mean jack though, so I tested launch time for iphoto, itunes, safari and so on.. differences weren't enough to matter.



    Overall improvements in iPhoto made alot more imact to performance than the hardware though.



    Sooo, I wouldn't get too worked up over the intel mac. Over time, it can only get faster as the software catches up, but if you weren't planning on upgrading, I wouldn't do it as you don't gain much.. (typing this on my 20" intel iMac, G5 in another room)
  • Reply 14 of 15
    What impressed me was the the iMac Core Duo can even beat my dual 2.5 Power Mac G5 which has a Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drive as its boot drive and can normally annihilate anyone else's Mac!



    However, it's mainly because the iMac doesn't spend as much time in the pre-gray Apple logo no man's land. The benefit of EFI booting I guess. My PowerMac also has over 3 GB of RAM, so maybe validating it takes time.
  • Reply 15 of 15
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    Originally posted by michaelb

    ....What impressed me was the the iMac Core Duo can even beat my dual 2.5 Power Mac G5 which has a Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drive as its boot drive and can normally annihilate anyone else's Mac!..........






    *shakes fist* damn that fancyshmangled EFI thingy...!!



    heh. rest assured your 10k raptor demolishes any 7200rpm drive out there. the "realworld" tests by hardmac were impressive http://www.hardmac.com/articles/55/

    i am assuming yours though is the 10,000rpm 8mb cache 74gb? or do you have the new one hardmac reviewed above?

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