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Power Mac G5 Quad Core speed

Compared with others of it's era - http://www.barefeats.com/quad02.html

Compared with its Intel replacement and more in depth - http://www.anandtech.com/show/2064/20
<edit> - Sorry thats a dual not a Quad but hey you can use Google ;)

It was one of the fastest machines of its time but like all things tech it was soundly thrashed by it's replacement (running UB and not Rosetta) in the same way that those early Intel MacPro machines are now soundly thrashed by today's MP's - And after next week (if they release new MP's) those will in turn no doubt be thrashed.

All of that is irrelevant if it's still useful and does what's needed plus you get the bonus of using a really beautiful (and super bargain priced), unique piece of history into the bargain. As beautiful inside as it is out, a real piece of art.

Who on earth would want a 2005 era PC sitting in pride of place in their home today? :eek:
 
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rjcalifornia said:
However since it is a 2005-06 technology, and since I bet some here still have one, I wonder how fast is it, and compared to what :)
Click to expand...
Well here's mine, still plenty fast enough for everything I do to-day.
Purrs like a kitten and quiet as a mouse.
 

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What pump does it use? Dual or single? Oh, another question I have for you. Suppose your ambient room temperature is 80-90 degrees.. Does your G5's fans start to rev to compensate for the room temperature? Mine does that all the time.. but as soon as the ambient temps are below 75 degrees, my Quad is also as quiet as a mouse.. but when its hot in the room, its not so quiet anymore.

I checked my LCS and no signs of leaks or anything of that nature. Sources mentioned that the single pump G5's were the most reliable where as dual pumps were prone to problems. Mine came out in the last few months before the Mac Pro in 2006.

jbarley said:
Well here's mine, still plenty fast enough for everything I do to-day.
Purrs like a kitten and quiet as a mouse.
Click to expand...
 
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spunkgarLEWII said:
Mine came out in the last few months before the Mac Pro in 2006.
Click to expand...

If its that late it should have the Panasonic pump which was fine, the earlier machines had a pump system manufactured by Delphi that leaked due to corroding pipe joints.
 
Your thinking of the dual 2.5, not the Quad. If you do a search for Quad G5 LCS.. you will see the Delphi/Cooligy dual pump and the single delphi improved pump.

There is no source stating that the G5 Quad or Late 2005 models of the G5 Quad has Panasonic LCS.

wobegong said:
If its that late it should have the Panasonic pump which was fine, the earlier machines had a pump system manufactured by Delphi that leaked due to corroding pipe joints.
Click to expand...
 
My serial number indicates it was manufactured the very last week of 2005,
so what does this mean when it comes to the number of pumps?
Never had any problems with it cooling wise, we do not have air conditioning, but I've never felt the need for it.
I have and older home with lots of screened windows that are open to the elements all summer, plus our location right next to the ocean supplies us with plenty of nice cooling breezes.
The only time I've ever heard my system fans ramp up was when I did a thermal calibration, and boy they can get noisy.
 
jbarley said:
My serial number indicates it was manufactured the very last week of 2005,
so what does this mean when it comes to the number of pumps?
Never had any problems with it cooling wise, we do not have air conditioning, but I've never felt the need for it.
I have and older home with lots of screened windows that are open to the elements all summer, plus our location right next to the ocean supplies us with plenty of nice cooling breezes.
The only time I've ever heard my system fans ramp up was when I did a thermal calibration, and boy they can get noisy.
Click to expand...

If its a late one the pumps were much more reliable, if it's not leaking now then no worries.
 
rjcalifornia said:
Out of curiosity...

How fast is the PowerMac G5 Quad Core?

I mean I read the specs and it looks like it is still a beast, at least for me (Up to 16 GB of RAM OMG :eek::eek:).
Click to expand...

Yes, you're talking about the computing pinnacle of an age.

Based on many comments on these forums, many people who still have them are quite pleased.

Still, I think that any current Apple hardware (from the lowliest MBA) beats the crap out of the quad in raw computing power (and most other categories).

There's one category in which the G5 Quad is yet unbeaten: Power consumption and thermal output. Compare G5 (Late2005) and Mac Pro
550 W vs. 318 W or 1877 BTU/h vs. 1085 BTU/h

RGDS,
 
These things are always relative. The quad definitely felt fast on software and workloads of its era. If your needs correspond with the usage patterns of that time and you have the appropriate software versions, it will be fine. It only came with 2 internal HDD bays without modification and won't take any newer gpus. For most people I would say a new mini would be a better buy unless the powermac was well equipped and extremely cheap, and of course you already have the software for it.
 
I was still using my G5 Quad up until a few months ago and I loved it. I could still use it, but my game development needs intel. The G5 was an absolute monster when it came out. Being the last PowerMac, and the fact that it allowed for PCIe graphics cards, it really holds a special place in my heart. It was top-of-the-line and will always be the top-of-the-line PPC Mac. That means a lot to me.

I was using a flashed 7800GTX 512MB along with a 6600 256MB to drive the monitors and added in 16GB of RAM. Just being able to max this thing out was very gratifying. Add in a couple of SSD's and it was, and still is in my opinion, a great computer. Though I always wanted to try the 32GB RAM thing.....
 
JaguarGod said:
I was still using my G5 Quad up until a few months ago and I loved it. I could still use it, but my game development needs intel. The G5 was an absolute monster when it came out. Being the last PowerMac, and the fact that it allowed for PCIe graphics cards, it really holds a special place in my heart. It was top-of-the-line and will always be the top-of-the-line PPC Mac. That means a lot to me.

I was using a flashed 7800GTX 512MB along with a 6600 256MB to drive the monitors and added in 16GB of RAM. Just being able to max this thing out was very gratifying. Add in a couple of SSD's and it was, and still is in my opinion, a great computer. Though I always wanted to try the 32GB RAM thing.....
Click to expand...

re-iterate on that 32 gig ram thing. I thought we came to the conclusion that rabidz was lieing and you just can't put more than 16 gigs of ram in the thing
 
Lil Chillbil said:
re-iterate on that 32 gig ram thing. I thought we came to the conclusion that rabidz was lieing and you just can't put more than 16 gigs of ram in the thing
Click to expand...
Oh, ok. Well, I guess I have it at max then? I did not see the conclusion of that thread I guess. But that is good to know. Thank you.
 
JaguarGod said:
I was still using my G5 Quad up until a few months ago and I loved it. I could still use it, but my game development needs intel. The G5 was an absolute monster when it came out. Being the last PowerMac, and the fact that it allowed for PCIe graphics cards, it really holds a special place in my heart. It was top-of-the-line and will always be the top-of-the-line PPC Mac. That means a lot to me.

I was using a flashed 7800GTX 512MB along with a 6600 256MB to drive the monitors and added in 16GB of RAM. Just being able to max this thing out was very gratifying. Add in a couple of SSD's and it was, and still is in my opinion, a great computer. Though I always wanted to try the 32GB RAM thing.....
Click to expand...

Interesting. I mean I know it is a '2005' technology but reading the specs, looks like a beast ;)

----------
wobegong said:
Compared with others of it's era - http://www.barefeats.com/quad02.html

Compared with its Intel replacement and more in depth - http://www.anandtech.com/show/2064/20
<edit> - Sorry thats a dual not a Quad but hey you can use Google ;)

It was one of the fastest machines of its time but like all things tech it was soundly thrashed by it's replacement (running UB and not Rosetta) in the same way that those early Intel MacPro machines are now soundly thrashed by today's MP's - And after next week (if they release new MP's) those will in turn no doubt be thrashed.

All of that is irrelevant if it's still useful and does what's needed plus you get the bonus of using a really beautiful (and super bargain priced), unique piece of history into the bargain. As beautiful inside as it is out, a real piece of art.

Who on earth would want a 2005 era PC sitting in pride of place in their home today? :eek:
Click to expand...

haha ok, well no. I am not going to buy one. I was browsing through internet archive, and saw the apple website back in 2006 and they 'claimed' it was the fastest computer in the world.

I'm planning to get either a Macbook Pro or a white macbook.
 
Hi,

What this means is that you have the dual pump by Delphi and Cooligy.. It was until April of 2006 that Apple shifted to the single pump. The best way to know if you have the dual versus the single pump is by getting Hardware Monitor from the fine developers at Breslink. Look for RADIATOR or anything having to do with pump radiator - That is your clue you have the single pump.

The dual pumps were known for gumming inside the tubing and also causing periodic shifts with the cooling of the processors.

Of course, the only real way to know is by lifting up that G5 panel and seeing if its dual or single. If its dual, you will see two black like boxes.. if its a single, you will see tubes all over the place.

Please note that the single pump is not the same as the single pump of the Dual 2.5 and or Dual 2.7 as those leaked.

jbarley said:
My serial number indicates it was manufactured the very last week of 2005,
so what does this mean when it comes to the number of pumps?
Never had any problems with it cooling wise, we do not have air conditioning, but I've never felt the need for it.
I have and older home with lots of screened windows that are open to the elements all summer, plus our location right next to the ocean supplies us with plenty of nice cooling breezes.
The only time I've ever heard my system fans ramp up was when I did a thermal calibration, and boy they can get noisy.
Click to expand...
 
rjcalifornia said:
Out of curiosity...

How fast is the PowerMac G5 Quad Core?

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/specs/powermac_g5_quad_2.5.html

I mean I read the specs and it looks like it is still a beast, at least for me (Up to 16 GB of RAM OMG :eek::eek:).

However since it is a 2005-06 technology, and since I bet some here still have one, I wonder how fast is it, and compared to what :)
Click to expand...

First, the quad is the best Mac PPC available and I find that it is pretty reliable. Mine seems to have a problem with the CPU A, but I think it's time to clean it as I don't see any leak. Anyway, I'm looking for a case to restore it and possibly changing the LCS to a newer one (I must read on that to know if a LCS can work with ANY motherboard, etc, without to much tweaks).

For the performances, I'll compare my quad with my Late-2009 MacBook Pro. My G5 scored at 3488/3703 in Geekbench while my MBP scored at 3605 (64-bit). Those results seem to represent the reality. Although the G5 has 4 cores instead of 2 and an higher clock speed, for several things, my MBP will be faster. When it come to en/decoding newer format (like H.264), the G5 works a lot and my MBP is way faster. Well, I still can decode 1080p H.264 videos, but it takes way more CPU than on my MBP.

As I'm a developer, I prefer the G5 as a dev. environment for few things. First, Leopard is pretty fast on it in comparison to Mountain Lion. Second, when building, GCC split the works on the four cores, so it's pretty fast. Also, my G5 has two SATA-III HDD in RAID-0, but the controller is limited to SATA-I and I think the RAID-0 doesn't change much about the overall speed. Anyway, ~150 MB/s is fine for me.

For the memory, well, I mainly use memory for virtual machines. As sadly there is no applications for running virtual PPC machines, but only emulators, I don't use a lot of RAM. I do have 8 GB, but I would clearly be fine with ~4 GB while on my MBP, a good 16 GB would be nice.

You still have the limitation of PPC systems, but yes. The G5 is still pretty fast and still a beast which *could* compete with modern computers if there was a bigger support of the architecture. If you can fine a Linux distro with almost every package (I haven't used enough Debian to say anything about it's PPC port), it would be a beast for bunch of years.

Brief.

For encoding music with XLD : G5 > MBP
For encoding video in H.264 : G5 < MBP
For decoding video in H.264 : G5 < MBP
For compiling sources : G5 > MBP
For boot-time, etc : G5 > MBP
For HDD access : G5 > MBP (mostly due to the RAID-0, but a SSD in the MBP would change the result)

Well, in general the G5 is still a better machine, but I need new apps, so I can use it as a main machine.
 
Interesting you find the G5 faster than the MBP in some tasks. I have an admittedly slower (2.3Ghz) G5 and a little faster MBP (2012 model 2.0Ghz i7) but in every single way except high settings on those games that run on both (eg. Quake4 - which I can run on max settings on the G5 but not the MBP) the MBP totally blows away the G5, video encoding the difference is massive, G5 seems to take all day in comparison.

I don't do code compiling and although the G5 has 4 cores my MBP also has 4 real cores (reported as 8 due to Intel Hyperthreading) and an OS which generally much more SMP aware (and truly 64bit) than Leopard.
 
wobegong said:
Interesting you find the G5 faster than the MBP in some tasks. I have an admittedly slower (2.3Ghz) G5 and a little faster MBP (2012 model 2.0Ghz i7) but in every single way except high settings on those games that run on both (eg. Quake4 - which I can run on max settings on the G5 but not the MBP) the MBP totally blows away the G5, video encoding the difference is massive, G5 seems to take all day in comparison.

I don't do code compiling and although the G5 has 4 cores my MBP also has 4 real cores (reported as 8 due to Intel Hyperthreading) and an OS which generally much more SMP aware (and truly 64bit) than Leopard.
Click to expand...

The architecture is newer in your MBP. An i7 do have a better performance than a C2D with the same clock speed. You have Turbo Boost, I don't. You have hyperthreading, I don't. You have 4 physical cores, I don't. The C2D was still pretty basic in comparison to all features added later. So yes, the G5 is faster for few things, although it is not really faster, just a bit more. As I said, video en/decoding on the G5 is really bad. All advanced codecs (H.264) are optimized for SSE, MMX and all new Intel extensions. Were the G5 only had AltiVec.

(2012 MBP with i7 will socres between ~8500 & 11000, so it way better than the G5. My MBP scores the same than my G5...)
 
Yes fair enough, I have an aluminium MacBook (2.4 C2D) but havn't used it in ages (other than a media server), to be honest now thinking about it I wasn't completely overwhelmed by the speed difference between that and the G5 when I got it though it was much faster than the 1.67 PB it replaced.
 
As fast as my MBP 2011

It feels as fast as my MBP 15" late 2011. Not counting benchmarks, it does everything that I do on the MBP, except CIV V, which I use on my AMD box. The PMG5 benchmarks higher than my old 2009 2.53GHz "RuntBook".
 
rabidz7 said:
It feels as fast as my MBP 15" late 2011. Not counting benchmarks, it does everything that I do on the MBP, except CIV V, which I use on my AMD box. The PMG5 benchmarks higher than my old 2009 2.53GHz "RuntBook".
Click to expand...

Hmm interesting. I mean all these talks are about high end tests. I meant to say easy task such as... facebook, youtube, MySpace, Google Plus, the new Flickr, etc
 
rjcalifornia said:
Hmm interesting. I mean all these talks are about high end tests. I meant to say easy task such as... facebook, youtube, MySpace, Google Plus, the new Flickr, etc
Click to expand...

with facebook and the web if you have a fast enough internet connection then even a chromebook feels the same as a 12-core mac pro both running google chrome.
 
Lil Chillbil said:
re-iterate on that 32 gig ram thing. I thought we came to the conclusion that rabidz was lieing and you just can't put more than 16 gigs of ram in the thing
Click to expand...

I only have 8 GB, but I will be updating, and will try to add a 4GB stick in with new 3 new 2GB sticks.
If it fails, will it not boot, or will it boot but accept only half of the 4GB stick?
Has anyone ever tried to use more than 16GB of ram in a Quad?
 
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