iMac G5 Refurb?

[andrewheard]

Hi,
I'm going to be buying a new mac over the summer and its going to be an iMac of some kind. I have a mac mini at the moment but I find it slow for things like video encoding. I was initially planning to do the obvious and get an intel iMac but a lot of my favourite software hasn't been made into universal binaries yet. I could go for a G5 iMac ($1179CDN) and not have to deal with all of the issues during the intel transition period or I could get an intel iMac ($1299CDN) that will be faster in 8 months. Am I correct in saying that there isn't a huge difference between the two when using native binaries?

I don't know what to do so I was hoping you guys could tell me. By the way, I will be buying another computer 2 years after I get this next one.

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

 

[CanadaRAM]

The performance of a given OSX (non UB) program under G5 vs intel/Rosetta will depend entirely on what the program spends its time doing... tasks that are emulated well, or tasks that are inefficient.

Average SEEMs to be about the same, but YMMV.

Undoubtedly, you'll get a speed boost as the program is released in UB. For $100 some odd difference, I don't see it being worth getting the older machine - esp if you are looking at the intel iSight model and want more than 1.5 gb RAM -- there's only one socket, and that 2 Gb 533MHz DIMM module is expensive still.