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Macworld reports 2.3GHZ powermac is as fast as 2.5GHz???

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Falcon500

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 3, 2002
18
0
Can anyone explain to me why the powermac dual 2.3GHz G5 was able to keep up with the Dual 2.5GHz model. Macworld explains it was because of the hard drive? I thought the 250GB found in the 2.3Ghz was the same speed as the 160GB in the 2.5Ghz model, 7200rpm. Why would one be faster than the other?

Powermac G5 benchmarks - Macworld.com

The reason I ask is I own a 2.5Ghz model and if I can speed it up by replacing the hard drive, it is something worth doing.
 
yea, i saw this a while back and was a bit surprised. i remenber the explanation was that the new hard drives are better and able to handlee more data, even though they are both 7,200rpm

And if you really want to feel a speed boost put in two 10,000rpm hard drives and put all your system files and apps on it and on the other put all your media, so if you use an app like Final Cut it will blaze.
 
yeah its probably a chip set difference. both drives are the 150Mbit serial ata 7200 rpm drives.. also they could be different OME.
 
the 250 GB has more data on the same area so on a sustained data transferrate it can get up to 250/160 is over 50% faster. Since this is only part of the total performance and you have other factors (seek time etc.) limiting the transferrate the actual performance increase will be smaller but still there will be a noticable speed difference.

This is the same reason why a DVD (4.7GB) has a standard transferrate of 1000 KB/s (1x) compared to the 150 KB/s for a CD (factor 6.7:1)
 
If you want the fasted HD available, I'd recommend going with a WD Raptor. These are amazingly fast (and quite noticable too). You'll give up HD space (max size is 74GB) but should notice a significant speed boost.
 
tsk said:
If you want the fasted HD available, I'd recommend going with a WD Raptor. These are amazingly fast (and quite noticable too). You'll give up HD space (max size is 74GB) but should notice a significant speed boost.
Click to expand...

You will not get a lot of a speed boost by installing the raptor. Yes it spins faster but it has half the data density. I have no actual benchmarks at hand but it is likely seek time will be shorter but the maximum sustainable data rate will be less then your present 160 (148) GB harddrive.
 
Falcon500 said:
Can anyone explain to me why the powermac dual 2.3GHz G5 was able to keep up with the Dual 2.5GHz model. Macworld explains it was because of the hard drive? I thought the 250GB found in the 2.3Ghz was the same speed as the 160GB in the 2.5Ghz model, 7200rpm. Why would one be faster than the other?

Powermac G5 benchmarks - Macworld.com

The reason I ask is I own a 2.5Ghz model and if I can speed it up by replacing the hard drive, it is something worth doing.
Click to expand...

This makes me want a Power Mac even more :D
 
macworld benchmarks are BS, they also claimed that a 400MHz tower was faster than a 450MHz cube and was a pretty big blow to the cubes sales when it was just one benchmark in there own proprietary odd benchmark.

apple changes the brand of the HD in powermacs all the time, dont worry about it.
 
minimax said:
You will not get a lot of a speed boost by installing the raptor. Yes it spins faster but it has half the data density. I have no actual benchmarks at hand but it is likely seek time will be shorter but the maximum sustainable data rate will be less then your present 160 (148) GB harddrive.
Click to expand...

Data density not withstanding, the 74gig raptor drive will make a noticable difference. I have one in my PC and it is very, very fast. Definately worth the purchase. Anyone with a Powermac, which is supposedly top of the line, should have a WD 74gig raptor in it.
 
Celeron said:
Anyone with a Powermac, which is supposedly top of the line, should have a WD 74gig raptor in it.
Click to expand...

Oh OK. Let me just chuck this 250 gb drive in the rubbish bin here... :rolleyes:
 
Celeron said:
Data density not withstanding, the 74gig raptor drive will make a noticable difference. I have one in my PC and it is very, very fast. Definately worth the purchase. Anyone with a Powermac, which is supposedly top of the line, should have a WD 74gig raptor in it.
Click to expand...

Yes it definitely does make a noticeable difference. A friend of mine installed one of these in her Power Mac G5 and now uses the 74GB Raptor as the OS X startup disk and the 160GB stock HD as a secondary data drive. With the Raptor, her system startup/boot time is about 20% faster than before and applications now launch noticeably faster than they did when using the standard 7200 RPM SATA HD that the system came with.
 
The reason for the increase in speed is the larger buffer on the new hard drives, if i remember correctly. Just a little fyi....
 
I think they were testing out and seeing the effect of one of Apple's cooling techniques on the PM 2.5

Read...

what if our Dual 2.5s REALLY ARE running too hot??

And you'll find that on some "hot" code the throughput of the CPU get's throttled back 20% on the PM 2.5s.

Don't know if they found the same thing on the PM 2.7s though.
 
Macworld showed very obviously that they didn't know what they were doing when they said that they were puzzled by the fact that the 256mb radeon 9650 was slower than the 128mb radeon 9600XT in UT2k4. Anyone with any technical knowledge (and these guys should have it if they claim to be knowledgeable enough to benchmark and publish mac hardware) would know that beyond a certain level of memory, current 3D game performance depends much more on your RAM SPEED than the RAM amount. The XT is clocked faster the the 9650 in both ram and chip speed and that's why it's faster. This article really makes me doubt those macworld technicians' competence.
 
tsk said:
If you want the fasted HD available, I'd recommend going with a WD Raptor. These are amazingly fast (and quite noticable too). You'll give up HD space (max size is 74GB) but should notice a significant speed boost.
Click to expand...

You mean fastest SATA drive??? There are faster HDs available - SCSI 360 drives that spin at 15,000 RPM with upto 360 MB / sec transfer rates as opposed to a Raptor's max of 150 MB/s transfer rates (buffer to host max; buffer to disk 72 MB/s sustained).

A nice SCSI Seagate Cheetah at 146 GB, 15K RPM, and ultra 360 interface: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,655,00.html

Longer list of choices: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/index
 
pdpfilms said:
Damn. I knew my 1TB RAID array was no good....
Click to expand...

Size has nothing to do with speed. Also, RAID arrays (of any flavor) have all been proved absolutely pointless on the desktop unless you happen to be doing extensive video/audio editing or some sort of hard drive intesive task. If you're just surfing the web, reading email, or playing games, your expensive 1TB RAID array (which I'm guessing is software based out of OS X, no thanks), is a very expensive paperweight.

Basically, what it comes down to is the Raptor drive is the fastest desktop level drive. Listing a bunch of Ultra320 15K SCSI drives is pointless for so many reasons.
 
PPC benches are all crap...............Its why Steve is saying see yah wouldnt want to be yah! Amd is the King at the moment and everytime i run Doom3, or HL2 or Pacific fighters it proves it to me. A dual 2.5 can almost match my year old single 2.2 ghz AMD 3500 that came out of that same IBM plant Apple makes G5s. Please. Spin is Spin. G5 is a dog.....woof woof.
 
Celeron said:
Basically, what it comes down to is the Raptor drive is the fastest desktop level drive. Listing a bunch of Ultra320 15K SCSI drives is pointless for so many reasons.
Click to expand...

It was only a few years ago that all you could get in a Mac was a SCSI drive. I don't understand why you say that an Ultra 320 drive is pointless (you didn't list any of your so many reasons) or what you mean by "desktop level". One can get a 15k RPM 36 GB SCSI Ultra 320 for $259 at CDW (http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/specs.aspx?EDC=474950.) The 176 GB Cheetah is just over $1000, but ACER makes some larger ones in the $400 range that spin at 10K and still have faster transfer rates (DOUBLE the max rates) to the raptor. Why not use those? Just install one or two of those in your case up to a SCSI card (can link up to 15 I think on a single SCSI channel) - no RAID necessary, plug and play with a fast "desktop" solution.
 
Size has nothing to do with speed. Also, RAID arrays (of any flavor) have all been proved absolutely pointless on the desktop unless you happen to be doing extensive video/audio editing or some sort of hard drive intesive task. If you're just surfing the web, reading email, or playing games, your expensive 1TB RAID array (which I'm guessing is software based out of OS X, no thanks), is a very expensive paperweight.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately for you, I'm a film editor. Boo hoo. Of course size has nothing to do with speed, that's why it's a RAID array, and not just mounted to the desktop.

Basically, what it comes down to is the Raptor drive is the fastest desktop level drive. Listing a bunch of Ultra320 15K SCSI drives is pointless for so many reasons.
Click to expand...

They were only trying to help. Stop flaming.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
PPC benches are all crap...............Its why Steve is saying see yah wouldnt want to be yah! Amd is the King at the moment and everytime i run Doom3, or HL2 or Pacific fighters it proves it to me. A dual 2.5 can almost match my year old single 2.2 ghz AMD 3500 that came out of that same IBM plant Apple makes G5s. Please. Spin is Spin. G5 is a dog.....woof woof.
Click to expand...

i really cant wait to see the look on your face when mac gameing still lags behind pc gameing with intel macs, it's the software dummy.
 
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