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Buying powermac maybe - questions

S

sejanus

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 3, 2005
105
0
Hi,

I am a photographer and was looking at something a bit grunty to be able to speed up my wedding workflow and stuff like that a bit.

Some questions if you don't mind :)

1) I currently have a 15" 1.5ghz PB with 2gb ram & tiger. To be honest for a laptop it performs very well. I don't have easy access to a G5 - but can someone please tell me what I'm sure is obvious - is the dual 2.7ghz G5 a really big leap in performance over the powerbook? I expect it is and I want it to be for the pretty high price.

I have to work on very large files (12 and 14 megapixel cameras) and though my powerbook deals with jpegs pretty well it tends to be pretty slow with raw files.

2) Apple's ram prices are pretty wild. I'd like 4gb ram with room to go to 8gb later. Does anyone know if the Giel DDR400 1gb sticks will work fine? I know they'll fit etc., but have heard OS X can be a little finicky with ram used.

3) I like a lot of other people was expecting dual core. It ain't here - now, it'd kill me to buy this powermac and then have dual core announced a few months later - Do you think it is reasonably safe to assume the next powermac update won't be for around 9-12 months?

cheers
 
sejanus said:
Hi,

I am a photographer and was looking at something a bit grunty to be able to speed up my wedding workflow and stuff like that a bit.

Some questions if you don't mind :)

1) I currently have a 15" 1.5ghz PB with 2gb ram & tiger. To be honest for a laptop it performs very well. I don't have easy access to a G5 - but can someone please tell me what I'm sure is obvious - is the dual 2.7ghz G5 a really big leap in performance over the powerbook? I expect it is and I want it to be for the pretty high price.

I have to work on very large files (12 and 14 megapixel cameras) and though my powerbook deals with jpegs pretty well it tends to be pretty slow with raw files.

2) Apple's ram prices are pretty wild. I'd like 4gb ram with room to go to 8gb later. Does anyone know if the Giel DDR400 1gb sticks will work fine? I know they'll fit etc., but have heard OS X can be a little finicky with ram used.

3) I like a lot of other people was expecting dual core. It ain't here - now, it'd kill me to buy this powermac and then have dual core announced a few months later - Do you think it is reasonably safe to assume the next powermac update won't be for around 9-12 months?

cheers
Click to expand...

1) You'll see a world of difference between your powerbook and the G5. If you get the chance, take in a photo on a thumb drive to an apple store and play with it in Photoshop (usually installed).

2) I hadn't heard anything about RAM problems unless it is cheap no-namebrand RAM. If you already own it, give it a try. I personally never buy Apple RAM and get Crucial instead or half the price.

3) I'd expect the next powermac update to be a lot sooner than the last one, ~6 month range, January at the latest. The last update was pretty weak, so no gurantees on what's next. As upgrades go, who knows. Apple killed off the SP 1.8 G5 2.5 months after it was shipping... so you're never really safe.
 
I don't know about the Geil RAM. However, you can get Kingston really cheap through newegg.com and Kingston claims their PC 3200 is compatible with the G5. Geil is a big company so I would assume that they adhere to JEDEC latency standards for memory. Most companies do and that is what really matters.
 
Chip NoVaMac said:
i am sure that others will chime in, but from what I understand OS X only allows 2gb per an application.
Click to expand...

I read somewhere that the newest version of Photoshop for Mac OS X now allows 3 or 3.5 gigs of RAM to be used.
 
I have a 1.5-year-old PM G4 (specs below) that I use very heavily for batch actions on large (8MB) image files, and it performs very nicely.

With that said, I cannot imagine anything I could throw at a dual 2.0 G5 PM with 3GB of RAM that it couldn't handle. Unless your shooting medium format with a digital back, the dual 2.0 with Photoshop would be a very nice digital darkroom setup.

I, too have heard the "rumor" about PS's memory addressing upgrade, but found no documentation of it on Adobe. I already have all the plug ins that the nex functionality offers, so it's PS CS for me.

Good luck.
 
I shoot two canon 1d mark II's with no problem I curently only have 1gb on a dual 2.5 but am getting it up to 5 this friday, Photoshop CS can only use 2gb max, however the new CS2 can use up to 4gb :)..


BTW: a photographer I work with uses a Mamiya 645 with an imacon 22mp back, he uses a dual 2.5 with 8gb of ram. seems to work nicely for him..... I say go for a 2.3 and max up the ram
 
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