G5 Speed Different

[sk8er123]

This isn't a question per say, but something I found interesting. First off, I purchased my G5 quad about 2 months ago for $150 (pricey, I know, but I wanted it!) I love it! Getting to the point, I saw that there are power consumption options. I was curious to see what kind of difference these made on performance. So I ran geekbench on the "Highest" setting and "Reduced"... The results astounded me.. I was expecting a difference don't get me wrong, but NOTHING like it was. 1790 for reduced and 3471 for "Highest"!! This might not come at a surprised to some people but this is my first G5 and I was surprised..idk just thought I would share something I found interesting.

 

[gavinstubbs09]

Certainly a huge difference, here is a comparison of my 2.3 vs my old 2.7 (granted that had 6GB of ram but still).

I believe the power option locks it down to 800MHz as a safe speed, however I dunno if that applies the same way to power settings.

 

[eyoungren]

This isn't a question per say, but something I found interesting. First off, I purchased my G5 quad about 2 months ago for $150 (pricey, I know, but I wanted it!) I love it! Getting to the point, I saw that there are power consumption options. I was curious to see what kind of difference these made on performance. So I ran geekbench on the "Highest" setting and "Reduced"... The results astounded me.. I was expecting a difference don't get me wrong, but NOTHING like it was. 1790 for reduced and 3471 for "Highest"!! This might not come at a surprised to some people but this is my first G5 and I was surprised..idk just thought I would share something I found interesting.

It's not so surprising, although since you are new to PowerPC I guess it might be.

When you run in 'Reduced' mode you are essentially disabling either a processor, higher functions or both. That corresponds with reduced processing power, which of course lowers your Geekbench score.

Running in 'Highest' mode means you want the full power of all processors and cores and that's reflected in a higher Geekbench score because you're getting the full amount of processing power.

More power also equates for more electricity draw so operating in 'Highest' mode is going to draw more current.

 

[Dronecatcher]

When I briefly dabbled with Debian on my Powerbook, there two commands to show the scaling and current frequencies of the CPU:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

I wonder if there's a OSX equivalent? Sure be handy to see what the CPU is up to when set to different power options.

 

[Xernicus]

I'd be very interested to know what enabling CPU Napping in CHUD tools does to the CPU performance.

I personally keep my 2.0 DP G5 on High Performance all the time, and have absolutely no problems with heat or noise. However, I have torn down this tower and rebuilt it, with fresh thermal paste for both processors, the U3, as well as the video card (Radeon 9600).