New Addition: G5 DC 2.0

[robertdsc]

While I am on vacation, I've been flipping through Craigslist for prospective Macs to work with and I found one, a G5 Dual Core 2.0 with 3.5 GB of RAM.

After hauling it home, I did a basic cleaning but need some tools that I'll acquire later. I dropped in my older daily driver HD that ran Tiger. The Mac boots up and runs fine so far.

It has the square power plug, PCI-E slots, and a GeForce 6600 video card worth 128MB VRAM.

It will replace my Dual 2.0, which will go into storage.

This Mac also came with an externally beat-up Cinema HD display with ADC adapter. The monitor has no back leg and I knew that going in.

I am under the impression that a dual core machine will be faster than a dual processor machine. True?

 

[Intell]

Dual core G5's are generally faster than dual processor machines of same clock speed.

 

[gavinstubbs09]

You'll also benefit with the faster DDR2 speeds over the 400MHz DDR Ram.

 

[bunnspecial]

I'll just put in a plug and say that my DC 2.0 is by far and away the fastest feeling and most responsive G5 I've used(although I've never used a Quad).

As a general rule, with all else being equal(which of course is not usually the case), having two cores on the same chip will be faster than having two separate single core processors. At least on paper, if you compare the 970MP to the 970, the 970MP uses a smaller process(90nm vs 130nm), and has double the L2 cache per core(1mb vs. 512mb). These two things on their own-especially the L2 cache-should help a computer powered by a 970MP "feel" a lot faster than a computer powered by two 970s of the same clock speed.

Add to this that, as mentioned above, the DC/Quad models benefit from using PC2-4200 RAM as opposed to the PC-3200 RAM in previous G5s. Not only is the RAM faster, but you can have twice as much of with a max of 16gb vs. 8gb for DDR based G5s(or sometimes 4gb in lower end models).

 

[robertdsc]

Thanks for the insight.

If this Mac ever bombs out, would I be able to use the GeForce 6600 card in a Mac Pro?

 

[Intell]

It would have to be flashed for EFI, rather a waste of a PowerPC card. Most cards that would work in a Mac Pro are much more powerful than that card.