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MacTruck

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 27, 2005
1,241
0
One Endless Loop
I am using a powerbook 1.67ghz. I am thinking about getting a dual 2.5ghz G5. How fast is this computer really. Can I hear from some people who own this system? Am I going to be blown away from the speed difference or will it only be slightly faster? Thanks.
 
4x faster on multi-processor aware apps.
3x faster on average.
multi-tasking, SMOOOOOTH....
 
THIS MUCH!
stretches out arms
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If it wasn't faster, what's the point of making the tower and a dual 2.5 G5? I would hope it would be faster, otherwise a lot of people would be very upset for spending the money. You might not notice the speed in small things such as Safari or e-mail and instant messaging, but you will with the big programs.
 
So far the only people commenting on the speed are people with Powerbooks. Does anybody have this machine and has used a powerbook that can comment on the actual noticable speed difference?
 
We just replaced a dual-867 G4 at work with a dual 2.3 G5. I loaded a set of batch actions on the thing and it sliced through them like butter.

You won't be disappointed.

Cheers.
 
Well, I dont own a powerbook but I do have a rev. A iMac G5 1.8 and a 1.8 DP power Mac and I can tell you that difference in speed is felt mostly in power apps. Final cut and after effects for example. Render times nearly double in the iMac!! Also I can have safari, after effects, photoshop and illustrator, and itunes running at the same time with out the system slowing down to a crawl! And from what I see in barefeats the 2.5 should be at least about 30% faster than mine. On iDvd it takes about and hour and some to encode and burn a 1 hour dvd! I actually thought it was a long time untill I found out that most people leave it encoding over night!

Hope it helps.
 
Macabron said:
Well, I dont own a powerbook but I do have a rev. A iMac G5 1.8 and a 1.8 DP power Mac and I can tell you that difference in speed is felt mostly in power apps. Final cut and after effects for example. Render times nearly double in the iMac!!

Are you saying that the imac is faster than your dual 1.8 Powermac?
 
Of course not!!
Im sorry if my lack of writing skills gave you that impresion.
The 1.8 DP is of course the faster machine. In a another note I have a dual screen setup (2 x 15"s) and but like the 17" widescreen of the iMac better. I guess I will need to start saving for a 20", I might even will have to settle for dell. :(
 
My dual 2.0Ghz PM G5 is twice faster than my PB G4 1.5Ghz on numerical simulation(Same compiler(gcc4.0) with same option).
 
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

The Dual 2.0 powermac I used was FAST! I was playing WoW, had web windows open, was folding and I had resources to spare... too bad it pooped out on me. Still one heck of a machine!
 
GFLPraxis said:
I think he meant "nearly double THAN the iMac"

No he didn't. That would make the Power Mac twice as slow to render. He meant what he said; MacTruck picked it up wrong.

andy.
 
It's not even a comparison.

I just sold my 15" 1ghz powerbook, and upgraded to a dual 2.3 pm. I also installed the 10,000 rpm raptor as my boot drive. The thing flies.
 
Well, I had my new Dual 2.7GHz G5 arrive a week ago. I can't compare the speed to a PowerBook as I don't have one, but moving from a 3.0GHz P4C running Linux (Gentoo) to the Dual 2.7GHz, I couldn't help but be slightly underwhelmed at the speed.

By all means it's a very fast machine, but not a huge leap from Linux on a 3GHz HT P4 in terms of responsiveness. That said, I haven't put the Mac under much heavy load yet, so I guess it hasn't really had a chance to spread its wings.
 
I've used dual 2.0s for regular computing, but never anything serious. Compared to a 1.25 Ghz iMac G4, they don't really seem that fast. Where they really shine is in raw computing horsepower: massive renders, huge multi-layered photoshop documents, gigantic audio files. Then there's no comparison -- the dual G5s blow the iMacs away.
 
The duals are quite fast. In my home office I use a G5 DP 2.0 which sits next to an eMac G4 1.0 that the wife and kids use. There is a world of difference. I think the biggest factors are the bus speed and hard drive speed. The jump from a G4 to G5 also adds a boost. It's like driving a school bus vs a Porche.
 
Here is some number I can provide. I ran so called Fast Multipole Algorithm which can accelerate the computation time for matrix time vector. I used only 10 source points to save time (it usually goes up to 100,000). I used gcc with -O3 option for both computer

PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz, 256+512MB, 15", 49sec
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0Ghz, 512MB, 17sec

Also I used -fast option which available only with G5
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0Ghz, 512MB -fast option 14sec


And Just for fun I tried it on my dell pentium 2.5Ghz with visual c++ complier without any option it took 61sec


I hope it helps
 
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