What should I do...G5 buying decisions

My 1.8 G5 hs just shipped 2 days ago. I'm sure that would be fun.
I honestly don't have the moneyt for dual considering that i have to buy amount of software for it that equals half the price of the computer. Photoshop, illustrator, Authorware, Office v.X, FInal Cut....

But to be honest, I wouldn't get dual even if i had money. Even for digital arts major i don't think dual is that much necessary, considering it will get old in a couple of years anyways...
From macs i'd go for dual 1.25g4, 1.8 g5, or falcon talon (www.falcon-nw.com) - from PCs

If you can afford it, I'd say keep it. If anything, it could help to future-proof your investment. Apple and IBM seem to expect great things from the multi-processor aspects of the G5, so maybe today it won't seem needed, but maybe 2 years from now you will be glad you have them. But if it is hard for you to afford and justify it, then by all means, you can downgrade to a single processor model. The 1.8 will probably be a beast, too. At the end of the day, it's up to you to decide what is important to you and if you can justify that extra cost.

Re: What should I do...G5 buying decisions

You do have to make your own mind up. However, there are other factors besides the MacAddict tests you need to keep in mind.

What else will you be running while you are running photoshop? Playing back video of some sort or maybe listening to music? Having chat programs and mail open?

What if the restraining factor on those tests was the 512MB of RAM? A 115MB PSD image would have had a fair bit of disk activitiy during any major manipulation. What dufferences between the boxes would them all having 1GB or 1.5GB of memory have shown?

What else will you be running while you are running photoshop? Playing back video of some sort or maybe listening to music? Having chat programs and mail open? Even if photoshop can't mak efull use of the processors due to the amount of RAM on the system, these other programs could make use of the remaining processing power.

Unfortunatly the MacAddict article is very biased with the tests they did. The ran something that needed to go to disk to compare the system pwer without verying the memory sizes on all the boxes to do a proper comparison.

So another factor for you to consider is how much RAM you need to give your system the best performance? Some people run fine in 512MB others need the 2GB (or more) of RAM for what they run.

The other factor is how long before you can upgrade to a faster box? I suspect it will be a few years. So my recommendation is to keep the Dual 2.0 order and add memory from Crucial or Kingston or one of the other reliable manufacturers. When sizing memory requirements remember to add photoshop's requirement to the reqyurements of what else you normally will keep running.

The above post isn't correct about dual proc's not being important in digital editing solutions (at least according to Adobe, it's important).

The second proc would be valuable now as well in the future as Photoshop is multiprocessor aware. Consider when the G5 is 3 years old. Would you rather buy a faster single proc system again or be content with a dual proc system that meets your needs?

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/c9ba.htm

Originally posted by tomf87
The above post isn't correct about dual proc's not being important in digital editing solutions (at least according to Adobe, it's important).

Click to expand...

I don't think and didn't mean to imply that photoshop wouldn't use the second processor. However if the system is memory starved, the second processor won't make much difference as ithe system now gets bogged down waiting for disk I/O.

In some of my own (not very scientific) tests, Photoshop does make use of the second processor with a probably limitation on my system on the memory bus (MDD). The G5's having a much better memory subsystem will be even better at using both processors. You just need enough memory so it doesn't have to wait for disk I/O.