G5 doomed by 17" MBP

[the vj]

No way... I have been working with Lightwave doing 3D animations for at least 2 years. I have been attached to my Quad G5 for 4 years not almost.

But today I installed Lightwave in my !&" mab book pro, is not the latest but the previous revision.

The renders takes literally half the time, the G5 has 4GB of ram while the 17" has 2GB.

Is amazing, I was waiting for January to get the new Mac Pros but now is obligatory. What a difference.

 

[iamcheerful]

that's a major difference you experiencing. indeed, you should've gotten an intel on hindsight.

 

[the vj]

The thing was that a few years ago I was working with my 12" G4 1.5 powerbooks and I needed to complete a project and I got a regular G5 machine for the rendering.

My surprice was that the G5 was in no way faster than the Powerbook, The G5 had 1GB of ram and the PB 1.5. I had to do a render farm with both in order to complete the After Effects render. Of course I returned the G5 to the Apple store for a refund. Reason: overrated.

A year later I got the quad G5 because I believe I could get something at least from 4 processors. And I have been happy since then.

With the intell processors I have been giving time for Apple to settle down the technology. I do not like to do small jumps but big ones.

A few moments ago I was thinking about putting my 17" MBP to work as a side machine. It was never that fast but it was ok, some renders were faster in the G5 still.

But the 17" has Leopard and I got the latest Light wave trial version that works fully featured for 30 days.

I left the G5 doing a render overnight and it took 9 hours. I wouke up and was rendering still, about 10 minutes left.

I transfered the animation to the 17" because I need to render the same scene but with a different object (one is the Smirnoff Ice bottle and the other one Smirnoff Black, same thing different lable).

My suprice is with the preview render.... right away! And now is doing the entire same animation plus some other stuff and is taking 3 hours and 5 minutes to finish with 43 minutes already done.

Is amazing this machine. And I was planing buying a renderfarm with PCs.

I believe January is gonna be good, imagine 6 cores and 1.5GB video card!!! if not anything is better of what I am using now.

 

[iamcheerful]

i can't say i dislike small jumps, but it is mainly budget and convenience factors.

i moved from a powerbook g4 400 to my current 8-core 2.8 machine (on hindsight, i should've picked the 3.2) anyway, that's that for me.

hopefully this machine can last me the next 8 years minimum
1-core per year! hahaa!

 

[the vj]

But... I just provved that those benchmarks are just lies. They always say the new is twice as fast as the preview. The reality is that you need at least 3 years to get an actual twice the speed.

Again, that happened with the G4 and G5, I do see intel has a faster curve but between one revision and the next one is just psicological.

Of course... never buy the first revision of anything.

 

[TheReef]

I'm tempted to replace my 1.8Ghz G5 with one
It's amazing something so small and portable can slaughter something so massive and power hungry like this G5, thats processor progression for ya.

 

[iamcheerful]

But... I just provved that those benchmarks are just lies. They always say the new is twice as fast as the preview. The reality is that you need at least 3 years to get an actual twice the speed.

Again, that happened with the G4 and G5, I do see intel has a faster curve but between one revision and the next one is just psicological.

Of course... never buy the first revision of anything.

it is twice the speeds but what is twice the speeds? that's what we have to ask ourselves.

but truth be told, usually they are incrementally faster but that doesn't warrant an immediate replacement by the most of us out there.

as for never buy the 1st revision of anything, i would say there're times when we should always buy the first revision, just that the times are not that often.