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Will Lich King Expansion Run Well on G5 Tower?

L

lutopia

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi Folks!

I'm looking at buying a used G5. Something like this:

"Dual 2.0 GHZ PowerPC G5
4GB DDR SDRAM
ATI Radeon X800 XT Video Card with 128mb of VRAM"

Is anyone playing Wow's latest expansion on anything like this? If so, how does it run?

Thanks!

Luis
 
Eidorian said:
How much is said used G5 and why do you plan on buying it?
Click to expand...

$1,000. In all other aspects I think it's a huge upgrade over my Quicksilver. The only other intensive program that I'd like to run is Logic Pro.

Currently I have a P4 machine that I play Wow on but I'd rather just have the one tower.

Any thoughts?
 
US$1,000 in the United States?

You would be better off with a Mac mini then if you're moving from a Quicksilver.
 
lutopia said:
Thanks for the quick reply! Have you run both of those programs on a mini then?
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Are their any internal components relevant to Logic Pro in your Quicksilver that you're going to need to carry over to your new machine?

You might be looking at a 7200RPM drive as well and this complicates things. Maybe you should consider a refurbished iMac or even a used one. Sadly the Mac Pro hasn't dropped down to the ~US$1,000 arena yet. You might get lucky with a 2.0 GHz system.

Is your software Universal as well? Anything OS 9?
 
I have both

I have both a mac mini and a G5 (the water cooled dual 2.7, with 4Gb) and the G5 stomps the mini at Litch. The problem is the mini has the lowest end graphics card available. Mine has 1GB of RAM so you're at the minimum of what the game wants.

All in all, the mini is a great email and web machine, but just isn't up to gaming.

my 2 cents
 
Osglith said:
I have both a mac mini and a G5 (the water cooled dual 2.7, with 4Gb) and the G5 stomps the mini at Litch. The problem is the mini has the lowest end graphics card available. Mine has 1GB of RAM so you're at the minimum of what the game wants.

All in all, the mini is a great email and web machine, but just isn't up to gaming.

my 2 cents
Click to expand...
And people run WoW on far less than the 9400M G...
 
Osglith said:
I have both a mac mini and a G5 (the water cooled dual 2.7, with 4Gb) and the G5 stomps the mini at Litch. The problem is the mini has the lowest end graphics card available. Mine has 1GB of RAM so you're at the minimum of what the game wants.

All in all, the mini is a great email and web machine, but just isn't up to gaming.

my 2 cents
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! So, your G5 runs Lich well? Any ideas of what frame rates you get?
 
lutopia said:
Thanks for the reply! So, your G5 runs Lich well? Any ideas of what frame rates you get?
Click to expand...

ATI Radeon X800 XT Video Card with 128mb of VRAM with this video card you should get in the high 50fps with most settings maxed out. It is a old GPU but it was a at the time ultra high end card and i dare say that it may still be able to run circles round the 9400m.
 
babyjenniferLB said:
ATI Radeon X800 XT Video Card with 128mb of VRAM with this video card you should get in the high 50fps with most settings maxed out. It is a old GPU but it was a at the time ultra high end card and i dare say that it may still be able to run circles round the 9400m.
Click to expand...

Honestly you will only get 50fps with that card if you are running in low mode (and never in northrend) or have a few things turned up (keep spell detail way down, as well as draw distance & shadowing). I have a GTX 295 with everything maxed out and its hard to keep 50fps anywhere in Northrend. Around other areas i wander between 80-120+ FPS.

Whatever you do there is a known and Blizzard admitted problem with their "ultra mode" shadowing, make sure that is down one notch if you dare try everything maxed out. However if everything is maxed out on that card you would be lucky to get 10-18fps, 50fps not a chance.
 
e²Studios said:
Honestly you will only get 50fps with that card if you are running in low mode (and never in northrend) or have a few things turned up (keep spell detail way down, as well as draw distance & shadowing). I have a GTX 295 with everything maxed out and its hard to keep 50fps anywhere in Northrend. Around other areas i wander between 80-120+ FPS.

Whatever you do there is a known and Blizzard admitted problem with their "ultra mode" shadowing, make sure that is down one notch if you dare try everything maxed out. However if everything is maxed out on that card you would be lucky to get 10-18fps, 50fps not a chance.
Click to expand...

You should be aware that Dalaran fps is very dependent on latency more than GPU grunt. Also that a Ati 1600 can do 30-70 fps in Dalaran on my connection with my old PC with most settings pretty high would show ether your drivers are not up to scratch or your internet connection is rather high latency.

I am on a 50Mb fiber connection and usually have 3-5 ms latency, i suggest you look at your settings and connection and find out what is causing your issue.
 
Forget the G5 and the mini. Shop around a little and for as little as $250 more you can get a 24" iMac 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM, 320 GB hd, and a Radeon 2600 Pro 256 MB video card. For another $60 you can upgrade the RAM to 4 GB. This the previous gen iMac, but still new in box. You'll end up with a *much* more powerful machine than either of the other two options.

Even if your budget can't get you past $1,000, still shop around, it took me less than five minutes to find a refurbished 24" iMac 2.16 Core 2 Duo (Two generations back) with an nVidia 7300 128 MB video card (About the same $60 to upgrade the RAM to 3 GB) for $950. And a refurbished G5 Dual 2.5 Ghz tower for $899 and a *Quad* 2.5 Ghz G5 for $1,100. Do read up on the pluses and potential minuses of the liquid cooled systems though if you consider one.

One other thing you may or may not want to consider, particularly since you seem to hang onto your machines for awhile, is that the next OS X release, Snow Leopard, due in September, requires an Intel based Mac. It looks like the current OS, Leopard (sans the "Snow") will be the last that supports G5 based Macs.

Good luck.

Snark
 
Since this is in regards to gaming performance in world of warcraft and not overall performance the Radeon 2600 Pro 256 MB iMac you suggest is significantly slower than the GPU being provided with the Powermac.

And the 2nd iMac you offer has a Geforce 7300 which is on a par with the 9400m in the current Mac Mini.
 
umm... why aren't you considering the :apple:Mini more?

My MacBook (which has the same 9400M graphics) runs a 23" ACD HD at full details (minus shadows) and gets great frame rates. I will imagine better frame rates than the G5 since its vastly superior hardware.

Don't buy into this G5 PPC superiority complex, the lowest of the low C2D beats the pants of all but the highest Quad G5. And the 9400M graphics chip is a capable and well supported graphics chip, which will soon benefit from OpenCL (extra processing power in Snow Leopard) and full H264 hardware acceleration.

$1000 for a G5 system at this point is madness, unless your work depends on a PPC only binary.
 
Thanks for the many replies. Sounds like it would be better for me to look for lower level current generation machines than the high end of several years ago.
 
This thread is full of fail.

A 9400GS is better than an X800XT... by a long shot, in terms of both compatibility and performance.

And a $1000 Mac Mini is better than the used G5 you listed in your post, especially for games: INCLUDING Wrath of The Lich King.

Logic Pro will run just fine and by the look of things you use your Mac for leisure more than for work in which case an Intel mac will serve you a lot better than a PowerPC and you obviously don't need the expansion ports (just about the only advantage I can see in that G5).

Not to mention the G5 is a power hog; simply put, unless there was a reason you NEEDED PowerPC (PPC application from work that won't run on rosetta) or the machine was dirt cheap you'd be a complete fool to buy a G5 tower right now, your case doesn't really seem to fit either condition.
 
Chone said:
This thread is full of fail.

A 9400GS is better than an X800XT... by a long shot, in terms of both compatibility and performance.

And a $1000 Mac Mini is better than the used G5 you listed in your post, especially for games: INCLUDING Wrath of The Lich King.

Logic Pro will run just fine and by the look of things you use your Mac for leisure more than for work in which case an Intel mac will serve you a lot better than a PowerPC and you obviously don't need the expansion ports (just about the only advantage I can see in that G5).

Not to mention the G5 is a power hog; simply put, unless there was a reason you NEEDED PowerPC (PPC application from work that won't run on rosetta) or the machine was dirt cheap you'd be a complete fool to buy a G5 tower right now, your case doesn't really seem to fit either condition.
Click to expand...

Not in your dreams is a 9400m going to outperform a x800 in raw speed, in features yes but not in raw speed. The X800 when it was out was a high end card that preformed very well. The 9400 is a low end igp that is close to the last generations low-mid ranged desktop cards.
You can see clearly in the benchmarks linked here that the 9400m is only on par with the X800m which was not even in the same league as the desktop counterpart which we are talking about now which is over 30% faster then the mobile version.
 
babyjenniferLB said:
Not in your dreams is a 9400m going to outperform a x800 in raw speed, in features yes but not in raw speed. The X800 when it was out was a high end card that preformed very well. The 9400 is a low end igp that is close to the last generations low-mid ranged desktop cards.
You can see clearly in the benchmarks linked here that the 9400m is only on par with the X800m which was not even in the same league as the desktop counterpart which we are talking about now which is over 30% faster then the mobile version.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't base that off of the 3DMark 05 synthetic benchmark. Even 3DMark 06 isn't a good idea anymore.

The same can be said of the 7600GT vs. the 8600GT. There are some instances where the former will beat the latter. Then again that would be in older, less shader intensive games.
 
Eidorian said:
I wouldn't base that off of the 3DMark 05 synthetic benchmark. Even 3DMark 06 isn't a good idea anymore.

The same can be said of the 7600GT vs. the 8600GT. There are some instances where the former will beat the latter. Then again that would be in older, less shader intensive games.
Click to expand...

We are talking about performance for World of Warcraft a game which has effects that run quite happily on a Voodoo 3. A 3DMark 2005 score is more that sufficient here at giving a accurate benchmark of the cards for this game.

At the end of it the OP will get more versatility with a Intel Mac mini but about 30% more FPS with the Powermac he has seen using the X800 GPU.

And just so you know the 7600 and 8600 are the same chip just slightly overclocked and repackaged nothing more.
And updated to correct this information the 9600 is the rebranded 8600, the 7600 is the predecessor on which the 8600 was reworked to include DX10 shader support.
 
babyjenniferLB said:
And just so you know the 7600 and 8600 are the same chip just slightly overclocked and repackaged nothing more.
Click to expand...
No they're not.

The 8600GT is based on a unified shader architecture and supports DirectX 10. Not to mention full h.264 hardware acceleration.
 
Eidorian said:
No they're not.

The 8600GT is based on a unified shader architecture and supports DirectX 10. Not to mention full h.264 hardware acceleration.
Click to expand...

It was based on the same die that was modified instead of being a completely new from ground up approach. Nvidea do this often or just rebrand the same chip to sell old as new. The have been for some time and many technology news sources out them for it.
 
babyjenniferLB said:
It was based on the same die that was modified instead of being a completely new from ground up approach. Nvidea do this often or just rebrand the same chip to sell old as new. The have been for some time and many technology news sources out them for it.
Click to expand...
Please show how the 8600GT is somehow a rebranded 7600GT. I'd like to know where you're getting this.
 
Eidorian said:
Please show how the 8600GT is somehow a rebranded 7600GT. I'd like to know where you're getting this.
Click to expand...

Since this is rather old information i would suggest you start looking at the archives of The Inquirer, Anandtech, The Register, or any other web computer related news source.
 
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