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How were some G5's considered high end back then?

rondocap said:
but how the heck did anyone ever work with the single 1.6, 1.8, and even the slower dual processors back then?
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Seriously, that has to be one of the dumbest questions ever asked on this forum.
Are you going to ask why a quad core 2.5ghz G5 isn't as fast as a quad core 2.5GHz imac?
 
That's not what I meant; I just meant that they still unusually slow for "pro" use. Obviously the ones today are much faster.
 
rondocap said:
That's not what I meant; I just meant that they still unusually slow for "pro" use. Obviously the ones today are much faster.
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Your framework for judging this is terribly, terribly skewed.

You're not making a fair comparison. For example, you have to consider that the 1.6/1.8GHz G5s were engineered for a price point to fill a niche for users that wanted more than what an iMac offered, but less than what a high-end user would need. Kind of the niche that the Mac mini fills now, but not quite.

Also compared to contemporary Pentium 4 procs, those G5s were smoking and the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM in a machine that didn't cost tens of thousands of dollars was HUGE in 2003. I don't think this can be stressed enough. I remember thinking at the time that it would be ages until that would actually be fully relevant/usable. I was almost right.
 
Its completely dependant on what your using it for.

Last year my photography set-up was a Canon 1d mark1 ( 2001) and a MDD. With Photoshop CS, and it ran amazing, cut through all my RAW's like butter, and i was running a pair of 19'' screens...

Use old stuff with old computers, and match accordingly. Don't expect your G5 to play BlueRay, don't expect your i7 MacbookPro to run a dot matrix printer...

Simples.
 
Giuly said:
An Athlon64 3400+ (1st gen) plays 720p along with a GeForce 2 MX perfectly fine. If you wanted 1080p, you had to throw in something that is capable of hardware decoding (aka GeForce 7). The same goes for 720p on a PowerMac G4 and probably even on a G5.
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Athlon 64. Athlon XP is 32bit.
 
Giuly said:
An Athlon64 3400+ (1st gen) plays 720p along with a GeForce 2 MX perfectly fine. If you wanted 1080p, you had to throw in something that is capable of hardware decoding (aka GeForce 7). The same goes for 720p on a PowerMac G4 and probably even on a G5.
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In my house there is a 3000+ with 7800gt and it doesn't play 1080p well, it is watchable but not nice tho.
 
Hrududu said:
You have to consider what the compuer world as a whole was like at that time. Multiple cores didn't exist, and dual processors were impossible for Pentium owners. Processor power wasn't (and still shouldnt be) based on watching YouTube videos and playing online games. The G5 was far faster at floating point computation and real world apps like Photoshop, video, and audio production. The ability to break the 4GB RAM barrier was also a really big deal at the time. Also keep in mind most of the bragging Apple was doing was based around the performance of the dual CPU versions of the G5. The slower single CPU versions were never really bragged about that much. Finally, Mac OS wasn't nearly as resource hungry back then as it is now. Load up Mac OS 10.3 (or 10.2.7 on an original G5) and compare how it runs with an iMac or Powerbook of the same vintage and you'll see why the G5 really did scream.
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I second the comment on floating point processing. I seem to remember my G5 DP LC had similar power to Xeon workstations at the time. How often have you heard the "macs are more expensive than pc's" statement? Obviously not true when you factor in all the hugely successful core apps as well as the overall user experience. However, hardware for hardware my G5 DP LC was actually cheaper than its Dell Precision counterpart.

I'm kind of sorry to say but my old PowerMac has seen better days; I have tracked down my hardware error to a ram slot or the ram itself. Lately I have been pondering using the case, which arguably PowerMacs and Macpro cases are still at or near the top, for a high end cad/cam/gaming rig. If my problem is simply bad ram I could still get a couple hundred bucks for it but a case of that caliber is easily worth that. I am also considering re-working the Delphi liquid cooler for use on an Intel six core, sans the corrosive oem coolant.
 
When I got my first G5 in 2003 (2GHz x2) I came from a PB Aluminium G4 1.25 and I did non feel a vast improvement. While when in 2008 I moved to a Mac Pro (early 2008, 3.2 GHz) I really had the impression of a much faster machine.

However, back in 1995 I did my biggest upgrade, from a Mac Classic (heavily accelerated though) to a PowerMac 7200/90 and I felt as it was a ripoff. I replaced it a year later with a 7600/132, a much better machine.

I believe that the combination of OS, available software and true raw power make a gestalt that has to be consided. For instance in 1995 I used the horrible Word 6 version for PowerPC on the 7200/90, System 7.5.2 was terrible and the Mac Classic with system 6.0.7 and Word 4 really screamed compared to it!

No internet on the Classic, but my reference was MS Word...

Still today Word 4 on a PowerBook 100 (yes, the slower 68000 based) lauches faster than Word 2008 on a MacBook..l

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-6CXn-4Jjc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

(www.webalice.it/beniamino.cenci.goga/68k/Macintosh_Classic_XLR8d.html)

(www.webalice.it/beniamino.cenci.goga/68k/Power_Macintosh_7600.html)
 
rondocap said:
That's not what I meant; I just meant that they still unusually slow for "pro" use. Obviously the ones today are much faster.
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There are no G5s today, they've been gone for a long time. At least new ones.

G5s back at the time were very fast machines. Not as fast as Workstations, but still very very fast.
 
sysiphus said:
It really is just all relative to what was being done on personal computers at the time. When I bought my dual 1.8GHz G5 in 2004, it was a $2000 computer, before the $500 graphics card or ~$300 of RAM was thrown in. And for the time, it screamed--it blew through Flash MX development, Photoshop CS2 renders, and could play the original WoW really smoothly (keep in mind this is when the game was new). Heck, a dual G5 with a Geforce 6800 or ATI X800 was the only Mac that could run Halo smoothly on high settings for quite some time. Keep in mind this machine shipped with Panther, and was best suited for Tiger--both of which were much less demanding than anything out there today.

The G5s were never great home computers in the sense of being so hot/power hungry, but for sheer performance, they were a very solid value for the first couple years ('03,'04). By 2005 they'd hit a roadblock for speed/value/heat vs what Intel could do, but if you took a dual G5 from 2004 and put it up against any Intel home computer of the same age, it'd do just fine. As for your concerns about speed of video playback...consider that Youtube didn't even exist back when the G5 was the hot new thing. Kind of a funny thought, no?
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It was not only intel was beating the g5 with the crappy netburst architecture but the athlon 64 was literally crapping all over both of them. It got even worse when the dual core athlons started shipping not to mention there was already dual socket opterons in 2003. Those machines still run new version of windows with ease today and can play full 1080p video without breaking a sweat.
 
OK guys, I actually have an interesting update and have followed the discussion here with interest.

I would like to rephrase my statement to include really only the single core 1.6 and 1.8 G5 machines. Why?

Out of curiosity, I picked up a late 2005 2.3ghz dual core G5 with a good amount of ram. It's significantly fast than my 1.8 single G5. In fact, it feels similarly to my 2.0ghz core 2 duo iMac. (They both geek bench within a few hundred points)

It's definitely a pretty fast machine, but I still maintain that the 1.6/1.8 singles are very slow, even for their time they struggle a bit. Basically the ram and hard drive were OK, my biggest issue was maxing out the processor too easily. 1.8 single cpu really maxes out with medium use. The dual 2.3 is much better.

Having said that, going back to my Mac Pro feels amazing - it just flies. It could also be my SSD drive, I may pop an SSD drive in the 2.3 and see how it responds.
 
Yeah there's a huge gap between the single and the dual models, I know there's a massive performance gulf between my single 1.8 iMac and dual 1.8 Power Mac. I'm planning on a 240GB SSD sometime in the next few months, too, so that'll be interesting.
 
You already have a proof and experienced what an SSD upgrade could positively affect an old machine's performance. Go ahead and dive in.
 
I've been running this 05' 2.3 dual core G5, and it's actually pretty quick for normal tasks and even some moderate ones. That 1.8 G5 I have does not compare, I'm even wondering if something may be wrong with the hard drive as it struggles with even Safari, while the 2.3 handles it closer to what my Mac Pro does. (although not as quick)
 
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