ffakr said:
You do realize that you can't even remotely compare the power consumption of a desktop to a laptop, right?
That entirely depends on the laptop and the systems being compared. If you look at the Pentium 4 "dekstop replacement" laptops, they eat enough power to reduce even high capacity baterries to less than an hour of life. A GeForce Go 5600 runs at 12 watts on its own, the 970FX is another 15-25watts, add on a 7200RM laptop drive (around 4-5 watts, I gather, but in shorter bursts), I have no idea on RAM wattage, but you'd see an increase in moving to PC3200 SO-DIMMS, and increase in the FSB and other fabric concerns.
The Powersupply in the G5 is, I've heard, rated up to 600 watts. Good power supplies are about 70% efficient. Right off the bat, the machine is going to waste a lot of power.
Yes, and this is supposed to change anything? If you take 70% of 600 watts, that's still 420 watts of expenditure. Take 70% of 420 watts and you come up with 294 watts. Halve that, and you're still at 147 watts. Take off half of that for power optimization in graphics cards and such, and you're still well over the G4 PowerBook's draw, as near as I can figure. With the 7447A, we're looking at around 35-60 watts across the whole system for the portable, though I'm having to guess at a few numbers in that figure.
Oh, and it better be rated to 600 watts, considering that the figure for the dual 2.0ghz is 604w at max draw.
The draw includes a desktop video card that is probably going to draw about 50 watts all by its self, and a 7200 RPM 3.5" hard drive. Also consider that a G5 supports multipliers other than 2:1 so Apple doesn't need to ship a laptop with an 800MHz system bus.
Surprisingly, the wattage of video cards isn't easy to find unless you're looking at the most current generation. The ATI x800 is considerably better at power draw than its predecessors at either nVidia or ATI, and it draws some 60-70 watts, as I recall from anandtech's review.
A quick look at hard drives revealed that a 7200rpm 3.5" desktop drive I looked at requires over 12 watts while spun up seeking. A 2.5" 4500rmp laptop drive requires 2 watts while spun up seeking. That's a factor of 6, not a factor of 2.
The G5 needs faster drives to keep it fed or you lose basically any performance advantage over the G4. That means that you're looking at 5400 and 7200 RPM, not 4500 RPM. The interesting thing is that 7200 RPM drives draw a minute amount of power over 5400RPM but provide a measurable performance boost because of lessened seek times (which keeps the drive in standby more often, and thus pulling less power when not heavily in use).
420 W max draw on a single G5 1.6 GHz tower.
the CPU has a typical draw of under 30 watts, max should be only slightly higher (Athlons and P4's Max is within about 10% of typical). That is nearly 400 unaccounted for watts outside the processor.
Yes, and quite a bit of that "unaccounted for" wattage is going to the subsystems that make using the G5 worthwhile - bus, RAM, drives, GPU, and so on. Without the fast support, you're going to be rehashing the thing that people complain about the most on the G4, which is a starved processor.
A G4 Tower has a powersupply that is roughly 400 watts. Figure the max draw of the machine is probably about 300 watts. Do you think that a G4 laptop has a max current draw of roughly half a tower? That would be 150 watts with a 55 watt/hour Li battery. So, a maxed out G4 powerbook would have 20 minutes of battery life?
It depends on the generation of PowerMac you're talking about, and I don't think that any of those are using the 7447A 1.5ghz part, which is one of the most efficient G4 chips ever manufactured. It puts out that clock rate at a svelte 11 watts and uses much less heat-intensive parts/
I don't think your assumptions are even close to reality.
I was making a comparison to make a point, not stating that there was a direct correlation. The G4 towers used 250-350 watt power supplies for most of their lives. The current generation is much more power efficient than ever, and yet the desktops are drawing off a supply that is
twice as fat as anything before. To put this another way, I could build a nice, fast PC from parts (well, as nice as PCs can be, that is

) and have it not need anything like 600 watts at peak.
Laptop-wise, the Centrino is what we need to be looking at. It's competing solidly with the P4 on performance and running a mere 22-25 watts at 2.0ghz since the die shrink to 90nm (something that the G5
doesn't do as a single chip). The G5 is not the way to go. I'm sorry, but the numbers just don't favor it, unless you'd rather have a louder, hotter PowerBook than we have.
eyeluvmyimac said:
i must commend thatwendigo on his input, i feel very enlightened having read his contributions to this thread and he (at least appears haha) to really know what he's talking about...that being said i would like to hear his take on the whole water/liquid cooling aspect because (i dont think) he has commented on that yet...
Thanks for the kind words. I make mistakes, just like any other human being, but I really do try to be well-informed and as objective as possible in the situation.
I'm staying out of the watercooling issue because I don't think it really needs to be discussed at this point. Liquid cooling, as in closed-system heatpipes, are already in Apple products. I'm typing at one at the moment (the eMac). However, I don't think that consumer active-pump liquid cooling systems are quite ready for mainstream yet. There's too much that can break and hurt other parts.
If anyone can do it, it's Apple, though.
