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iMac 1.8 Ghz G5 Benchmarks

huzzah said:
I posted the inital benchmark for the iMac G5. We are a primarily a Mac (about 150 G4's and G5's and 20 PC's) retail store. Our applications include heavy SQL user on several XServe's. We also have several new 2 x 2.5 GHZ G5's as servers now.

We ordered many Imac G5's as terminals for order and sales stations. This is our first delivery. This iMac does have a 17" screen; not 20". We have our own applications benchmarks (real world) performance so XBench (which is really screwy) and Cinebench mean little to me.

In a real world perfomance test, the iMac G5 is .948 (exactly) of an G5 1.8 SP (repeatable). That to me, is amazing because of the 600 MHZ FSB.We are ecstatic. All this with a great and very clear 17" screen. These iMac G5's are beautiful and quite snappy even with 256 MB. In fact, now I believe the 1.6 GHZ will do the job for us.

Xbench has reported CPU values on this iMac from 125.72 to 162.11; go figure. Maybe a new architecture ?? The one I submitted was in the middle. Disk benchmarks are more repeatable. Cinebench was also variable (mostly, as you know, due to screen depth and resolution). Maybe I have a sick machine; but I'm not complaining because the real world benchmarks are outstanding.

The interior of the machine is gorgeous and solid and will not disappoint anyone.

Maybe, additional benchmarks will clear up the variable nature of the tests I ran.

My analysis: $3000+ worth of quality equipment for $1499.

I give this machine an A. 🙂
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for adding a little human warmth to the cold benchmarks. That actually means a lot more to me than the numbers.
 
AL-FAMOUS said:
134..... thats a bit low isnt it?? i thought it would way out perform my powerbook 1.5 15inch superdrive

but nope... alas it doesnt
Click to expand...

I would expect it to outperform your 1.5Gh G4 by about 10-20% at most unless you were running something using really deep memory-- which wouldn't really happen with a benchmark...

I'd be interested in seeing some of the intensive Photoshop batteries run on this-- Xbench has no business calling itself a benchmark.
 
I compared my PB (see sig) to a new 1.8 G5 iMac on XBench and was surprised to see that the iMac barely beat out my PB. It had 1 GB of RAM too. I think this may be the fault of XBench as it may need an update, but do you think that since Tiger is going to be optomized for 64-bit processors, that there will be a significant improvement?

Just curious 🙂.

Congrats to all those who got they're new iMac,
JOD8FY
 
Xtremehkr said:
I know I posted this in another thread as well, but if it means what I thnk it does it's pretty exciting news.

G5 iMac parts you can install.

[/b]

It certainly seems to suggest that the midplane can be replaced and includes the Graphics card that everyone has been so unhappy about. What does it mean?
Click to expand...

If upgrades are to be an option for these iMacs in the future, why would Apple marketing keep that bit of info from us now? It seems to me that that is a selling point and therefore would be a fact worth mentioning at the release of the new iMac.
 
No chance

Apple will never (nor will a 3rd party) offer a replaceable board that contains the CPU, Video Card, etc. It's replaceable incase it breaks, but its just not profitable.
 
Mav451 said:
Why do i have the gut feeling that the iMac LCDs are not even close to the new Apple Cinema displays? I'm thinking they are probably either the old 20" or the same ones as the original G4 iMac line.



millions doesn't inspire much confidence for me -_-
Click to expand...


I mentioned this in the orignal thread about the new iMac G5 announcement.

The iMac G5 17" has quoted viewing angles of 120 H / 90 V which I'd say is really poor and the same as the iMac G4

My partner has an iMac G4 17" and the poor viewing angle is noticeable towards the bottom of the screen where colours looks lighter and text is hard to read at smaller sizes.

My 2 year old Sharp 15" TFT has 170 x 170 viewing angles, and is excellent quality, yet the new iMac G5 is 120 x 90 ummm.....

I note that the old iMac G4 20" was 170 x 170 I think, at looking and it in shops, it looked much better quality.
 
a better way?

Has anyone dropped a GeForce 6800 in a 1.6 Powermac?

At the Apple refurb price of 1299 plus the card at 599 an awsome system can be had for 1900.

You can upgrade the powermac and keep the card(since it will be top of the line for some time)

I would love to see some numbers for this system.

I.
 
macidiot said:
Well, the 64MB 5200 is about a $25 card. Typically you see 128MB for this card. Also, its at the low end.
Click to expand...

I was thinking that too, but you are wrong. The GeForce FX5200 is really a 50 $ card, but in the iMac there is a Geforce FX5200 Ultra, which is much higher clocked (325 Mhz RAM, instead of 200 Mhz, etc.) and is priced between 110 and 150 € here, so it could do better than expected. But right, all of those are sold with 128 MB RAM, even the cheap FX5200 models. The thing with the 64MB is really strange...

macidiot said:
While its unrealistic to expect a $400 video card in an iMac, it is not unrealistic to expect a $75-100 card in an iMac.
Click to expand...

Yes there is an even 120 $ card in it now! -20$ for only 64 MB ;-), so a 100 $ card. But I would LOVE to have the Radeon 9600XT finally. I hope there will be midplane upgrades or something like that... (I ordered the 17" with 1.8 Ghz and SD)
 
punkmac said:
Thanks guys.

This would put it on par with at least the powermac 1.8 (great!) Just cram it with RAM!

Wonderful, Now I have even more conflict. Powermac vs. iMac.

Exactly the same thing when buying my iMac G4!

AAARRRGHHH!
I.
Click to expand...

Same here!! And the last time I took the iMac, because of the display. And I don't regret it now. I have the 17" iMac G4 with 800 Mhz G4 512MB RAM and GeForce4MX with 32 MB.
When I think of the past, the Dual 867 G4 instead would be outdated for games and single processor apps as well and I would upgrade again to a G5. And the iMac is much cheaper plus a fine widescreen TFT.

So I will take the iMac again, although the weak graphics card... I hope for a way to replace the chip or midplane in the future.

I ordered the 17" 1.8 Ghz with SD. Although the display has only 120/90 viewing angle it is very fine, and I like it much better than any CRT.
 
What? Yes there is an "Automatic" setting for Desktops

I think you are mistaken as I look at my automatic setting on my 2.5 G5 and OS X 10.3.5



Bluefusion said:
Nope. There is no "Automatic" setting for Energy Saver on desktop machines--what would it be used for? No battery, thus, no energy conservation system. You control system sleep and display sleep, that's it.

So this score is a little odd.
Click to expand...
 
slipper said:
i was going to have my sister upgrade her 17" 1.25ghz G4 iMac, but if this is the case, forget about it.
Click to expand...

Crap. The iMac G4 is 1.5 to 2.5 times faster than the last iMac G4, depending on what you do. Especially 3D rendering and games are 2.5 times faster, although the same graphics card as in iMac G4. I am upgrading from a 800 Mhz iMac G4, and it will be great!
These XBench values are strange. I think it's because of the 256 RAM or some weird unexplainable stuff.

I ordered an iMac 17" 1.8 Ghz G5 with SD
 
Powermac vs. iMac

stuepfnick said:
Same here!! And the last time I took the iMac, because of the display. And I don't regret it now. I have the 17" iMac G4 with 800 Mhz G4 512MB RAM and GeForce4MX with 32 MB.
When I think of the past, the Dual 867 G4 instead would be outdated for games and single processor apps as well and I would upgrade again to a G5. And the iMac is much cheaper plus a fine widescreen TFT.

So I will take the iMac again, although the weak graphics card... I hope for a way to replace the chip or midplane in the future.

I ordered the 17" 1.8 Ghz with SD. Although the display has only 120/90 viewing angle it is very fine, and I like it much better than any CRT.
Click to expand...

Yeah it was really hard. I think the lineup was the dual 867, 1 gig, and the 1.25.

After many hours of benchmark reading the dual G4s really didn't blow the single away.

Then the iMac was upgraded to 1 gig plus the 64 MB video card, I was lured in by that pretty monitor!

And here I am again at the crossroads.


I.
 
For comparisons on Cinebench, you can check the XLR8yourmac.com benchmark database; remember not to select a resolution for this benchmark.

I didn't see any G5 entries however.

Two older G4 entries:

G4 1066 Apple G4 Dual CPU Nvidia GeForce3 1600x1200 OS 9.2 512MB software:5.53 opengl:7.08 rendering:13.21
Click to expand...

and

G4 1250 Apple G4 Dual CPU DDR ATI Radeon 9000 Pro AGP 1280x1024 OS 9.2 1024MB software:10.54 opengl:13.19 rendering:26.97
Click to expand...
 
stuepfnick said:
I was thinking that too, but you are wrong. The GeForce FX5200 is really a 50 $ card, but in the iMac there is a Geforce FX5200 Ultra, which is much higher clocked (325 Mhz RAM, instead of 200 Mhz, etc.) and is priced between 110 and 150 € here, so it could do better than expected. But right, all of those are sold with 128 MB RAM, even the cheap FX5200 models. The thing with the 64MB is really strange...

Yes there is an even 120 $ card in it now! -20$ for only 64 MB ;-), so a 100 $ card. But I would LOVE to have the Radeon 9600XT finally. I hope there will be midplane upgrades or something like that... (I ordered the 17" with 1.8 Ghz and SD)
Click to expand...
You don't have any idea what you are talking about. RETAIL for a 128mb 5200 Ultra at the nearest overpriced store in my vacant town of Wyoming, I can pick up this card for 50 bucks. Apple gets it easy for half that price. Then, since they design the implementation, they actually ONLY buy the GPU, which i bet is 5 bucks or less. But then you tack on the cost of their cheapest vram that can preform at the required clock, and the manufacturing cost...your up to $15 USD max. This card is ****, and you'll find out once you have one. Secondly, the ATI 9600pro chipset (which runs just as cool -so no heat problems there) is only $10 bucks more.

All of you consumers are falling into the trap of forking out a ton of money for a crappy investment. Sure, it'll look cool for 3-4 years, but don't plan on running anything more than iLife, MS Office 2004 and Snood for the next half-a-decade. Hey, if Snood is your type of game DIG IN! **** i could care less if you blow your money on the most pathetic VPU ever created. It shouldn't even be called a 'graphics excelerator'.

Now that i've expressed my dissapointed state, i'd also like to say that other than the GPU, i believe this to be a well priced and zippy consumer level mac. I just can't get over the fact that this can't even run Halo. You already can't play games that have already been released!.... I don't care what all you mid-aged email checkers think, your kids will want to play games. They'll go to the store, and pick up Sims2, and your computer will be chocking on the splash screens for the first 10 minutes. People just don't understand how bad this VPU is. To each his own. Some of us need a living room center piece to impress company... that's all i see the imac G5 as being... because of this shhittty card. Good luck running the next version of Snood!
 
Mudbug said:
Results 134.71
System Info
Processor PowerPC G5 @ 1.80 GHz
CPU Test 136.48
Thread Test 84.47
Memory Test 210.75
Quartz Graphics Test 188.34
OpenGL Graphics Test 187.25
User Interface Test 209.37
Disk Test 79.19
Click to expand...

Here is XBench for my 1.5gHz 15" Powerbook with 1GB DDR.
Results 131.54
System Info
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.50 GHz
CPU Test 179.92
Thread Test 134.09
Memory Test 127.14
Quartz Graphics Test 179.38
OpenGL Graphics Test 115.35
User Interface Test 228.72
Disk Test 72.89

It's interesting to me that the new iMac crushed my PB in the OpenGL test. I wonder whether this is CPU, GPU, or memory size causing this?
 
Regarding the Xbench benchmarks, I think that we should wait until the next version of Xbench is released before coming to any conclusions. I know that when I got my 1st gen iMac G4, Xbench gave me an Altivec score of 4! There were several posts at that time where people thought that their Altivec was "broken" due to Xbench's faulty benchmarks. When the G5 was first released, that too caused "problems" with Xbench. I am sure a new version will be released that is "adapted" for the iMac G5.
 
I'm waiting for Rev B

I am waiting for a rev B iMac, and I'll tell you why. I am not that thrilled with the 5200 GPU, but more importantly I don't need to replace my old iMac yet. I think the new iMac offers good value. For those that want a new mac and don't need dual processing power macs, go buy this baby.
 
iMac G5 benchmarks and RAM

When my 20" BTO finally ships, I'll post benchmark results for my iMac with its 512 MB of Apple-installed RAM, as well as with 1 GB, 1.5 GB and 2 GB. BTW, my beige desktop with a G4 running @ 583 MHz with 768 MB RAM and a Radeon Mac card scored 60 on rendering.
 
This is what I got...

CINEBENCH 2003 v1
****************************************************
Processor : G5
MHz : 2.0 GHZ
Number of CPUs : 2
Operating System : 10.3.5

Graphics Card : ATI 9600XT
Resolution : 1680x1050
Color Depth : millions

****************************************************

Rendering (Single CPU): 219 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 380 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.73

Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 266 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 689 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1477 CB-GFX

OpenGL Speedup: 5.56

****************************************************
 
It's nice to finally see some sort of benchmark but really they don't mean much right now but I would like to see some program benchmarks (like photoshop) after some people work them in.

Right now I'm thinking between an iMac or a PowerMac G5. I'm mostly going to be working with Photoshop, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver for school. I'm leaning towards the iMac partly because I don't have the money for a PMG5 and it would be overkill. Right now I have a PC and a PowerBook G4 (not the latest one, I don't know the model number but I got it last year around last summer) so I'm not starving for a computer and I'm going to have to wait anyways.
 
Converted2Truth said:
All of you consumers are falling into the trap of forking out a ton of money for a crappy investment. Sure, it'll look cool for 3-4 years, but don't plan on running anything more than iLife, MS Office 2004 and Snood for the next half-a-decade. Hey, if Snood is your type of game DIG IN! **** i could care less if you blow your money on the most pathetic VPU ever created. It shouldn't even be called a 'graphics excelerator'.

Now that i've expressed my dissapointed state, i'd also like to say that other than the GPU, i believe this to be a well priced and zippy consumer level mac. I just can't get over the fact that this can't even run Halo. You already can't play games that have already been released!.... I don't care what all you mid-aged email checkers think, your kids will want to play games. They'll go to the store, and pick up Sims2, and your computer will be chocking on the splash screens for the first 10 minutes. People just don't understand how bad this VPU is. To each his own. Some of us need a living room center piece to impress company... that's all i see the imac G5 as being... because of this shhittty card. Good luck running the next version of Snood!
Click to expand...

Oh my God. So you're saying that I ordered a 20" iMac by mistake, without realising that the graphics chip contained therein wasn't up to snuff for running the games I want to run? 😱 Oh my god! I'd better get on to my supplier and cancel the order straight away! Thanks so much for pointing out my mistake to me! 🙄

Newsflash for you. Not everybody buys computers to play games. Not everybody who buys computers has children. If I want to play games, I have a Gamecube which does perfectly fine, thank you very much. In any case, the games that I happen to enjoy don't particularly benefit from a 3D graphics accelerator; I'm talking about games like Starcraft, Diablo, Railroad Tycoon, Pikmin, FIFA 2004, Eternal Darkness, that sort of thing. Not first person shooters, as a general rule. Yes, ok, most games these days take advantage of a 3D accelerator, because it's assumed hardware, but apart from FPS, how much benefit is to be had by buying a faster accelerator? Not much (if any). I pretty much guarantee: 99% of non-FPS games will run just fine with the built-in GPU on the iMac.

No, I'm very happy with my purchase. It will do exactly what I want it to do, and very capably thank you very much. The CPU grunt will be adequate, as will the RAM (once I've upgraded it from stock levels), and I don't need a massive hard drive. I don't even particularly care if the LCD is of the same or lesser quality as the ACD 20", as long as it is clear enough -- I'm not looking for a screen capable of doing photographic quality work. If I were, I'd be buying a PowerMac and hooking it up to a high quality CRT. Hell, I don't even care if the pixel refresh is sub or super 20 ms, as long as it's not of the order of 50 ms. And this computer isn't really an "investment" in the traditional sense of the word. It's a tool. It does what it has to, and it does it well. That's all that matters to me, provided it's priced reasonably (and the iMac definitely is.)

Look at the capabilities of the GPU here. It's streets ahead of what most non-gaming people need. If you need more GPU than that, you're either a gamer (in which case, you're probably better off with a PC anyway, to be brutally honest), or somebody who does serious design work (in which case, you're better off with a PowerMac). Get a bit of perspective here, get a grip, and quit bitching about problems that, when you get right down to it, aren't all that serious in the end anyway. Anything you can buy is obsolete anyway -- it's a simple fact of life.
 
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