Dad's G5 spanked by Core Solo? It is sad.

[livingfortoday]

So I've been in "negotiations" with my dad to get his old PowerMac G5 (original 1.6Ghz, 4 RAM slots) if he upgrades to a Mac Pro, but now I'm not so sure if it'd be worth it. I've been running Handbrake on it, and it's getting the exact same speeds on encoding everything as my Core Solo Mini!

Now I know the G5 has a faster hard drive, and I always figured that a G5 processor would beat out a similar-speed Core Solo, but I guess I was wrong. The whole machine does feel snappier overall than the Mini, and I wonder if that's just because of the drive, since CPU performance seems rather similar?

Anyways, I just wanted to let people know that the Mini is apparently a very capable machine. Woo!

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

G5 was overblown hype & spin by Apple in my view one of the worst Cpu's Apple has had in years with lots of problems and issues. There are many reasons it was shown the door. G5 at the same clock as G4 shows little and we had G4 for what 10 years? Dont be surprised ,just be glad Apple didnt stick with it. Cpu wise a little mini can kick butt but the only thing that holds it down is the GMA 950. This time next month G5 will be history.

 

[Sdashiki]

The crippled 1.6Ghz G5, im not surprised, its HOW MANY YEARS OLD NOW!?

Compared to a brand new chip?

Cmon, what do you expect. The 1.6 is a joke, especially with the 4 slots!

Its old, and wasnt a hot to trot machine to begin with.

Anything today would beat a single G5, now a dual is another story.

 

[Chundles]

Anything today would beat a single G5

Especially the 1.6GHz G5 - I'm glad they gave that the big A quickly.

I'd re-negotiate, tell him you'll put your Core Solo into the living room and grab something Dual Core with the money you'd get from selling the old PowerMac.

 

[livingfortoday]

I'd re-negotiate, tell him you'll put your Core Solo into the living room and grab something Dual Core with the money you'd get from selling the old PowerMac.

Well, that was the plan for my apartment. To relegate the Core Solo to media center duty, and use the G5 for myself. But now it seems like it wouldn't be worth it. Maybe I should just get a second Mini, but a Core Duo.

And yeah, I know the G5 isn't the newest machine anymore, it's just sad for me to see it so humiliated by a Core Solo Mini of similar clock speed. I guess I bought into the G5 myth pretty hardcore!

 

[livingfortoday]

I should also mention - the Powermac got a score of 101 on Geekbench, while the Core Solo got a score of 127. Dang.

 

[Mord]

the g5 and the K8 are pretty neck and neck clock for clock and the athlon X2 gets it's ass kicked by the core duo so it stands to reason a single athlon 64/G5 will be spanked by a core solo.

 

[Killyp]

Mind you though, stength in numbers. A Quad G5 is still just about the most powerful machine money can buy. Can't wait until Apple does Quad QuadCore processors though...

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Mind you though, stength in numbers. A Quad G5 is still just about the most powerful machine money can buy. Can't wait until Apple does Quad QuadCore processors though...

Only problem there is only a handful of apps that know what to do with those 4 cores so in real world applications and games you get little. CPU vs CPU G5 is hammered unless you compare 4 of them to 1 Intel or AMD.

 

[Killyp]

Yeh, but I'll still be able to run 50 million VSTs at the same time on a Quad PowerMac...

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

As a consumer iam interested in who can paint the fastest frames in triple A titles not .........work.

 

[savar]

Only problem there is only a handful of apps that know what to do with those 4 cores so in real world applications and games you get little. CPU vs CPU G5 is hammered unless you compare 4 of them to 1 Intel or AMD.

That's why we run OS X -- apps don't have to know how to use all four processors, they just magically do.

 

[Josias]

A 2.0 GHz Core Duo is equivalent to a Dual 2.5 GHz G5. This is why I don't believe it will be so hard for Apple to make the Intel PM at least "2x faster" with Dual/Quad Conroe/Woodcrest...

 

[michaeldmartin]

the g5 and the K8 are pretty neck and neck clock for clock and the athlon X2 gets it's ass kicked by the core duo so it stands to reason a single athlon 64/G5 will be spanked by a core solo.

Not only does core duo beat athlon X2; it beats EVERY processor available on the market. It is very efficent. A 3ghz core cuo whips a 7Ghz P4; along with the PE.E. and the FX-62; Just can't wait until woodcrest and conroe come out!

 

[supergod]

I'm sort of pissed off by all of the bitching about the G5. The 1.6ghz G5 was a decent processor. Up until a few months ago I used my Powermac 1.6 with 1.5gb RAM, Radeon 9600 and it did the job quite nicely for Logic and most music apps including some heavy processing loads. I think that overall it is plenty speedy enough for most tasks (except games made after 2003,2004). That said, it was an aggravating mess of a machine that experienced glitch after glitch. Luckily I was able to get a ridiculously large ammount of money trading in my Power Mac (at that point only running for an hour at a time without crashing) and my Dell 2005fpw and buy an iMac for a similarly ridiculous low price: worked out that I only had to pay $75 for the much more powerful iMac, which incidentally was the sum total of change in my penny bank.

The first gen Power Macs are probably the glitchiest macs I have ever used and had pretty much daily (hourly) troubles, crashes, freezes and seemingly inexplicable errors. However, if they could've worked out the kinks to get the G5 processor into a mac mini, I would've probably bought one instead of my iMac.

 

[gnasher729]

So I've been in "negotiations" with my dad to get his old PowerMac G5 (original 1.6Ghz, 4 RAM slots) if he upgrades to a Mac Pro, but now I'm not so sure if it'd be worth it. I've been running Handbrake on it, and it's getting the exact same speeds on encoding everything as my Core Solo Mini!

Now I know the G5 has a faster hard drive, and I always figured that a G5 processor would beat out a similar-speed Core Solo, but I guess I was wrong. The whole machine does feel snappier overall than the Mini, and I wonder if that's just because of the drive, since CPU performance seems rather similar?

Anyways, I just wanted to let people know that the Mini is apparently a very capable machine. Woo!

It depends very much on what code you run. Handbrake has absolutely no optimisations for any processor; it is plain, straightforward C code, and it is all integer code. That is where the Core processors are strongest, so you can expect Handbrake to run at least as fast on a Core Solo as on a G5 of same clock speed. And it is incredibly processor intensive, so the slower harddisk and video on the Mac Mini don't make any difference.

It is a bit different with floating-point intensive code (G5 is an absolute floating point monster; it will take a Conroe chip to draw even), or if the PowerPC application is optimised for Altivec. In the latter case, it may take a bit until Core Duo optimisations are at the same level.

That said, a Mac Mini with Core Duo processor is _very_ fast for processor intensive stuff.

 

[QCassidy352]

A 2.0 GHz Core Duo is equivalent to a Dual 2.5 GHz G5. This is why I don't believe it will be so hard for Apple to make the Intel PM at least "2x faster" with Dual/Quad Conroe/Woodcrest...

Got a link for that statement? The best I've seen is a 2 Ghz core duo running roughly even with a dual 2.0 G5. And some benchmarks (macworld, for example) seem to have the dual 2.0 G5 beating the core duo soundly.

The first gen Power Macs are probably the glitchiest macs I have ever used and had pretty much daily (hourly) troubles, crashes, freezes and seemingly inexplicable errors. However, if they could've worked out the kinks to get the G5 processor into a mac mini, I would've probably bought one instead of my iMac.

My rev A single 1.8 ran absolutely perfectly from the day I got it until the day USPS crushed it. And even then it ran perfectly... it just didn't stand up straight any more!