a challenge to all pc users who prowl these boards.

[Platform]

VERY good thread....now let's see some REAL reseault rather than just talk

 

[Mord]

the fact that jiggy and other pc users here have not posted in the thread bodes well to the fact that i'm right.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Didnt anyone learn anything from the Doom3 thread? For me as a consumer gaming benches is where its at. I really dont care how fast iphoto springs open or how fast a blur can be done. I want to know how fast UT2K4 can run with everything on or Doom3 with everything on. I notice a lot of benches showing Doom3 with shadows off,med detail etc, whats that about? Barefeats have some interesting numbers on the new iMac vs last years and it was doing about 3 more frames. G5 is overrated and blown up by Apple. If it was so fantastic they wouldnt had to resort to dropping 2 of them into a PowerMac. Dec 2003 Macworld & Macaddict had benches and the dual 2.0 was holding its own against a single FX-51 2.2 ghz in everything but gaming. In gaming the Macs took a whipping. Anyways those benches were not shown on their web site just in the Magazines.

 

[feakbeak]

But one thing always baffles me about the economics of self-build ...

Doesn't the build time have a monetary value as well???

How much time / effort / money does it take just to locate all the relevant components, etc.


I'm not a particularly high earner but I reckon my rates for building a computer would have to be somewhere between £15 - 20 per hour --- otherwise I might as well get on with my job & pay others to get on with theirs ...

A couple of days work would soon wipe out any 'savings' ...

I don't think most people build PCs to save money. Most people build PCs because they are enthusiasts and enjoy the activity. That's why I do it. I like picking out each part, putting it together, tweaking it, etc. If I didn't enjoy the experience there is no way I would spend the time and effort to build a PC myself just to save a few bucks.

 

[cr2sh]

A couple of days work would soon wipe out any 'savings' ...

So, if we're including 2 week "build time" of pc's shouldn't we also include the 4 month "ship time" on a lot of new macs? How about the "Wait for anouncement time" which is REALLY popular in the Mac crowd... 4 months... 6 months.. a year of sitting around "I'm not ordering till we hit 3GHz" time?

I'd argue no. It's interesting to me and fun to research parts, its fun to build the system... it's fun to surf these boards, its fun to think about rumors. Its a wash...

 

[Mord]

Didnt anyone learn anything from the Doom3 thread? For me as a consumer gaming benches is where its at. I really dont care how fast iphoto springs open or how fast a blur can be done. I want to know how fast UT2K4 can run with everything on or Doom3 with everything on. I notice a lot of benches showing Doom3 with shadows off,med detail etc, whats that about? Barefeats have some interesting numbers on the new iMac vs last years and it was doing about 3 more frames. G5 is overrated and blown up by Apple. If it was so fantastic they wouldnt had to resort to dropping 2 of them into a PowerMac. Dec 2003 Macworld & Macaddict had benches and the dual 2.0 was holding its own against a single FX-51 2.2 ghz in everything but gaming. In gaming the Macs took a whipping. Anyways those benches were not shown on their web site just in the Magazines.

to suggest a mac for gaming is stupid we are not arguing that, it's not about the speed of the cpu it's about optimization, the G5 dose well on games which were equally optimized like quake 3, comparing a dual to a single is silly, the g5 powermac should be compared to a dual opteron/xeon not an athlon or P4. the g5 is about the same clock for clock as the K8 as i have said many times before SMP but loose on single threaded things like games.

dont hurt me just be happy with a pc and mac, the mac will not be competitive in the gameing arena untill/if apple gets at least a 20% market share which wont be for a while so stop bitching a whining about games. For a company with such a small market share it dose pretty well in gameing, this thread is about the raw speed and that the G5 is not behind the curve we are not discussing open gl Vs directX this is what cpu has the most raw speed in applications that mac users actually use.

 

[Xiabelle]

I've been self-building my own PCs for almost 10 years. Now, mostly, this is adding onto and upgrading old systems. However, I consider replacing a motherboard to be starting over so let's say that I last did it a couple of months ago. Why? I can get precisely what I want for a cheaper price, and building a PC is NOT hard at all. In fact, given how well things are color coded nowadays, you really don't even need to have much more than a little common sense to be able to tell where things go. The hardest part is the jumpers, if they need to be set.

The last build I did, when I bought a new cpu/MB combo, took me about 2 hours to complete. Why? Because I was clueless about P4s. The actual install itself took me 15 minutes. Then I had another two hours or so of swearing as I couldn't get it to power up, because I didn't realize that P4s required two power inputs My bad, it just took me a while to find the info and now I know. However, I do work on PCs for a living.

Frankly, the PC is faster in some regards than my mac, although my Mac /is/ a Mini, and the 1.42 with base ram doesn't compare to a P4 3.0 with 512 MB.

The benchmarks aren't really important to me. It's all based on what I want to do. I play a few games -- and really, given my favorites aren't available on the mac platform and the PC is a good gaming machine, I'm going to use it. Besides, I don't have any of the problems and horror stories I hear people gripe about. I run a clean machine and it's (mostly) stable. The mini is the general-purpose machine right now, and I'm trying to learn it. I don't see as much difference as some people do between them, outside of trying to still find some acceptable replacements for some specialty shareware I use.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

So we are picking and choosing performance and gaming is excluded because its a Mac? Interesting indeed.

 

[csubear]

VERY good thread....now let's see some REAL reseault rather than just talk

http://www.gromacs.org/benchmarks/single.php

Please look at this if you want to see REAL results that REALLY test the cpu and the memory bandwidth.

 

[Mord]

So we are picking and choosing performance and gaming is excluded because its a Mac? Interesting indeed.

shock horror most mac users dont game.

 

[cube]

self-build is more expensive than prebuilt. The advantage is that you can configure it with the exact components that you want.

 

[zelmo]

shock horror most mac users dont game.

I'm a Mac user and I love gaming, but not on my Mac. Might it be more accurate to say that most Mac users don't use a Mac for gaming, mainly because we accept that it is inferior to the PC for most current games?

 

[Mord]

dident mean it quite like that, i use my xbox allot and play WoW on my cube every now and again.

 

[jiggie2g]

You'll excuse me for taking my sweet time , you do realize that there is a 5hr time difference between London and NY. I work , Have a very bitchy girlfriend not including my girls on the side plus other responsibilities. so please be paitent and i will gladly kick ur G5's ass.

Well I guess I am disqualified because i don't use crappy Dell desktops but rather home built PC.

I also would like to ask that G5 owners post thier Cinebench results in 1 CPU rendering. Particular i'd like 2 see the 2ghz and 2.5ghz G5, if anyone already has a 2.3ghz and 2.7ghz G5 they are welcome as well.

Hector are there any programs in particular you would like me 2 use in order to make this comparision , and do Si Sandra scores count?

 

[feakbeak]

Well I guess I am disqualified because i don't use crappy Dell desktops but rather home built PC.

I also would like to ask that G5 owners post thier Cinebench results in 1 CPU rendering.

Hector are there any programs in particular you would like me 2 use in order to make this comparision , and do Si Sandra scores count?

I'd like to see your scores posted. Even if you want to throw them out because of this particular comparison for pricing reasons. I think self-built PC marks should be posted to show what is available on the platform - even if some wouldn't never do it themselves, it's nice to know it's an option. Plus, system building is quite easy these days.

Edit: jiggie2g, I see you added all the chest-thumping and trash talk after I quoted you.

 

[plinden]

I was keeding. You have to wonder though, about who is behind the seemingly incoherent ratings at times. I know there are PC users here, I just don't understand why they are PC users.

Don't really have a choice? I get a PC laptop from work, an IBM Thinkpad, which is a pretty decent machine. It would actually have been less expensive for them to buy me a PowerBook, but the IT department is IBM/Wintel only.

Then I have 3 year old PC from the days before I wanted a Mac. Try suggesting replacing that when your wife looks at you blankly and says, "what's wrong with the one you've got?" and there isn't anything wrong with it (except that it's not a Mac)

It's hard to justify spending upwards of $4000 to replace two PCs if they still work with no problems. Especially if you're cheap. Like I am.

Anyway, back to the subject of benchmarks - this was an interest thread I posted to a few months back, about compiling Java using different OSs: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/108938/

I found that my 1.6GHz P-M compiled slightly slower than the time given for a 1.5GHz PowerBook (even though Java SDK 1.4 is supposed to be slower in Mac OS X than in Windows) when I had the default background services and the virus scanner running. Disabling unnecessary services and the virus checker halved the time needed to do the compilation, so the PC was almost twice as fast as the 1.5GHz PB at raw compilation. Compiling, of course, involves a lot of disk access which cause the Windows indexing service and the virus checker to use a lot of CPU cycles.

However, even this benchmark doesn't say much about the raw speeds of the different CPUs, since as I've said, the Java 1.4 SDK is acknowledged to be not as well optimized for the Mac.

Edit: it would be interesting to see if compiling under Linux on Mac hardware would make any difference.

 

[Frobozz]

I definitely believe that the G5 is truly the fastest desktop processor chip among all those AMDs and Intels out there, without a doubt.

However, this takes into account that everything is fair. The problem is, very little is fair towards Macs. I give the following four reasons:

I totally hear you. For sake of getting into this discussion I'm going to quote you, because I agree on all fronts... however, I have some (interesting?) points:

1. It isn't fair that PCs can be self-built (saving much money), while Macs can't be self-built.

This is true. But you won't get much _speed_ out of custom building a mac. You'd only save money. Maybe you could get DDR2 667 ram in some 3rd party motherboard, but the whole stability of a closed architecture would be lost. So, there are clearly pros and cons. Cheaper = less reliable.

2. It isn't fair that Windows has an over 90% user base, even though we have a better OS.

Amen. Although some of that is Apple's fault. I think now is the best time in Apple history to be a Mac user, though. I'm glad XP isn't as ugly as previous incarnations, but DAMN is it useless.

3. It isn't fair that developers don't optimize their software on the Macs as much as they do on the PC.

Yeah this is a major issue. Glenda Adams had a great rebuttal to the "Why is Doom 3 slower on a Mac" thread on IMG. Boils down to about 10 issues, many of which are somewhat obvious to us on these boards. However, some interesting ones were the efficiency in integer math in x86 land. There's less penalty in conversionto floating point (I guess.) Another was obvious, but is why Macs are much better at usability than a PC: we truly multitask, so no single app will ever get 100% of the CPU like on a PC. That's why running 10 apps at once on a Mac is the same user experience as 1 (RAM permitting), but on a PC it's a living hell. So, again, it's a tradeoff. I'd rather have a more productive work machine than a faster game machine.

4. It isn't fair that games are considered a standard benchmark in most mainstream circles which, coincidentally, is the single weak point of the Mac.

Indeed! But let's keep perspective. The people on this board, and most computer enthusiast boards, are gamers. So these are the benchmarks they flock to. It also goes to show you what these people do on their computers-- play games. They shell out $1000's of dollars for game machines. Well, I make a living on my Mac, and do so in a more efficient manner than my PC counterparts. So I'll let them have gaming benchmarks for now. Sometime in the future it'd be nice to get FPS parity, but it ain't a priority for me. Even 20% slower won't actually effect my gaming experience.

In short, Doom 3 is why many people think Macs are slow and overpriced.

However, Doom 3 only runs well on nVidia hardware. Whereas, ATI totally DOMINATES nVidia on nearly every other game on the PC. So, it does go to show how poorly a single application's benchmarks are for evaluation. It also goes to show, as Glenda pointed out, how PC vendors can highly optimize their software for particular applications. This is not really possible on the Mac.

But seriously, the unfortunate fact is that all the unfairness means that benchmarks will usually go in favor of the PC. Unless you're Apple.

Amen. Yeah Apple loves to quote 40 filter Photoshop tests. I guess that is applicable to photo editors in a high volume (magazine?) environment... but pretty much no one else. Furthermore, does it *really* matter if I can shave 5 seconds off a minute of work? Unless volume is paramount the answer is "no." Which bring me to my next point ...

If you need to shave a couple seconds (or more) off of volume work such as rendering or complex computation ... get an xServe. Apple, ahdns down, as the easiest to set up and fastest cluster computing on the planet. User oriented tasks will be faster on a Mac because you're more efficient on it, and you can offload non-user tasks like rendering to other computers.

 

[jiggie2g]

Here you go Mac nuts

My PC

Here are my Preliminary Benchmarks , Please note that I just put this setup together a week ago so I am still tweaking.

So far I have gotten the Speed up to 2.5ghz / 512k L2. I know my CPU can do 2.7-2.8ghz but I am still using Corsair Value Select (cheap ram about $80 1GB 512x2)
so RAM is a limiting me from hitting max potential.

Settings are as follows:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+(Venice Core)@2.5ghz (313x8)
1GB DDR3200 Corsair Value Select , Timings 2-3-3-8 , Speed 208mhz
DFI Lanparty UT NF4 PCIe Currently Running 3xHTT , 939mhz eachway
Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA 7200rpm , 8MB cache , 8.5ms seek time
Leadtek Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCIe 16x


Cinebench Rendering 1 CPU : 348 CB-CPU


Si Sandra 2005 :


CPU Arithmetic Benchmark:

MY PC :
Dhrystone : ALU 11555 MIPS
Whetstone : FPU/iSSE 3951/5111 MFLOPS

By Comparision : P4-E 570 3.8ghz 1MB L2
Dhrystone : ALU 11115 MIPS
Whetstone FPU/iSSE2 4408/7934 MFLOPS

AMD Opteron 152 2.6ghz 1MB L2
Dhrystone : ALU 11573 MIPS
Whetstone FPU/iSSE2 4403/5242 MFLOPS


CPU Multi-Media Benchmark :

My PC:
Interger x4 aEMMX/aSSE 23836 it/s
Floating-Point x4 iSSE2 25645 it/s

By Comparison : P4-E 570 3.8ghz 1MB L2
Interger x4 aEMMX/aSSE 26856 it/s
Floating-Point x4 iSSE2 35810 it/s

AMD Opteron 152 2.6ghz 1MB L2
Interger x4 aEMMX/aSSE 24836 it/s
Floating-Point x4 iSSE2 26697 it/s


Memory Bandwidth Benchmark:

RAM Bandwidth Int Buff'd iSSE2 6124 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buff'd iSSE2 6042 MB/s

File System Benchmark:

SATA Drive 45MB/s

I think I did pretty well for now , Once I get some G.Skill PC4400 TCCD 2-2-2-5 RAM I know i can get another 20% out of this baby. plus hit 2.8ghz stable.

.............YOUR MOVE HECTOR

 

[Mord]

You'll excuse me for taking my sweet time , you do realize that there is a 5hr time difference between London and NY. I work , Have a very bitchy girlfriend not including my girls on the side plus other responsibilities. so please be paitent and i will gladly kick ur G5's ass.

Well I guess I am disqualified because i don't use crappy Dell desktops but rather home built PC.

I also would like to ask that G5 owners post thier Cinebench results in 1 CPU rendering. Particular i'd like 2 see the 2ghz and 2.5ghz G5, if anyone already has a 2.3ghz and 2.7ghz G5 they are welcome as well.

Hector are there any programs in particular you would like me 2 use in order to make this comparision , and do Si Sandra scores count?

a nice cross platform app i'd like to see though it may never happen is vue 5 http://www.e-onsoftware.com/, somone make a scene and post a screen shot of how long it takes to render, your not disqualified from benchmarks but you are from price comparison.

as for me i cant do any usefull benchmarks myself as all i have is a 550MHz cube a dual 450MHz cube and a 700MHz athlon (OC'd from 550 with multiplier mods and an 80w peltier)

 

[IJ Reilly]

it takes me about 15 mins to assemble, and then an hour to install stuff.

Go ahead, pull the other one.

I built a PC recently and it took me more than 15 minutes just to unpack all of the boxes, and organize the instruction manuals and install discs. Granted this was my first effort, but it was an 8 hour job from box cutter to boot up, excluding the time to install XP. If I were to do it again, using the same components, I suppose I could cut that time in half. But much less than that? Come on!

 

[feakbeak]

Go ahead, pull the other one.

I built a PC recently and it took me more than 15 minutes just to unpack all of the boxes, and organize the instruction manuals and install discs. Granted this was my first effort, but it was an 8 hour job from box cutter to boot up, excluding the time to install XP. If I were to do it again, using the same components, I suppose I could cut that time in half. But much less than that? Come on!

I agree. My first build took me about five hours from boxes to boot. My second build only took three hours. However, once you factor in the installation of the OS, drivers and basic software you're looking at a day project - if not, certainly enough to fill up a weekday evening. It doesn't take a lot of effort but certainly more than 15 minutes. I suppose if you had already unpacked and reviewed the hardware and sorted out all the case screws and cables, then maybe you could assmble it all in 15 minutes if you rushed, but it would be close. Besides, if you were in that much of a hurry you would be liable to make a mistake and fry your mobo or worse.

Plus, you have to consider if you are choosing to build your own PC you have to consider the time you spend researching and comparing components. For me, this usually takes serveral days if not a week or two (not solid time, obviously). The greatest benefit to building is to get the exact components and case that you want. Finding a nice case takes me forever. Half of the offerings are uglier than sin, once you weed those out you have to consider the cooling features, expansion options, what front ports you want, accessibility and layout, etc. It's certainly a task finding just the right case that fits your needs and style. Based on all this info, I don't understand the point in trivializing the effort required to build a system. Is it hard? No, but it takes a dedicated effort to do a good job. I enjoy it, but if you didn't like hardware it would really suck.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Exactly, exactly. It was an interesting exercise, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who don't have a technical inclination, or who don't care to have the "I built mine" bragging rights. The shopping time alone was hours -- and like you, the case was probably the biggest issue second only to the motherboard and CPU. Decide in a haste and repent in leisure, as they say. If saving every possible dollar is an issue, add in a few more hours for price comparisons.

I'd heard so many stories about saving a huge bundle by rolling your own PC -- and that's one of the reasons I decided to try it. Now I can say it just ain't so. Even discounting for my time, I didn't save much -- maybe $200, tops.

 

[jiggie2g]

I agree. My first build took me about five hours from boxes to boot. My second build only took three hours. However, once you factor in the installation of the OS, drivers and basic software you're looking at a day project - if not, certainly enough to fill up a weekday evening. It doesn't take a lot of effort but certainly more than 15 minutes. I suppose if you had already unpacked and reviewed the hardware and sorted out all the case screws and cables, then maybe you could assmble it all in 15 minutes if you rushed, but it would be close. Besides, if you were in that much of a hurry you would be liable to make a mistake and fry your mobo or worse.

Plus, you have to consider if you are choosing to build your own PC you have to consider the time you spend researching and comparing components. For me, this usually takes serveral days if not a week or two (not solid time, obviously). The greatest benefit to building is to get the exact components and case that you want. Finding a nice case takes me forever. Half of the offerings are uglier than sin, once you weed those out you have to consider the cooling features, expansion options, what front ports you want, accessibility and layout, etc. It's certainly a task finding just the right case that fits your needs and style. Based on all this info, I don't understand the point in trivializing the effort required to build a system. Is it hard? No, but it takes a dedicated effort to do a good job. I enjoy it, but if you didn't like hardware it would really suck.

But isn't that the case with just about everything in life , seeing thngs throught with hard work gives you a great sense of satisfaction. Thats what alot of the Mac users here don't understand about us PC guys. I we know every part from the Motherboard down to the kind of thermal paste we put on our CPU(Artic Silver 5). All these things to make something cool.

If people were just satified with having something that just works we'd all drive Honda Civics.

 

[Mord]

Go ahead, pull the other one.

I built a PC recently and it took me more than 15 minutes just to unpack all of the boxes, and organize the instruction manuals and install discs. Granted this was my first effort, but it was an 8 hour job from box cutter to boot up, excluding the time to install XP. If I were to do it again, using the same components, I suppose I could cut that time in half. But much less than that? Come on!

my pc is built from scavenged parts, it takes about 15 mins max to scew in all this bits if you know what your doing, i just put it all together powered it up and poped in a windows XP disk and thta was done in about an hour.

i'm an apple cert technician it takes me about 20 mins to take my ibook down to pieces.

 

[MBHockey]

Isn't Sisoft's Sandra Windows only?

How about javascript benchmarks for cross platform tests?