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Quad 3GHz Mac Pro vs Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac

Some_Big_Spoon said:
Well, we all knew that the G5 isn't a "bad" chip necessarily.. It's older tech, and I think, wasn't really meant for this kind of work (non-server applications).

Preaching to the choir am I?
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I actually want a G5 now that they have started coming down in price. I could get a dual g5 for a pretty good price, it sure is a step up from a Dual G4.
 
Quad 3GHz Mac Pro vs Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac



Barefeats provides benchmarks comparing the Quad 3GHz Mac Pro (Xeon) vs the Quad G5 2.5GHz Power Mac (G5). This represents the new top of the line vs the old top of the line Mac.

They provide benchmarks for both non-Universal and Universal applications between the Mac Pro 3GHz, Mac Pro 2.66GHz and PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5GHz.

The top-end Mac Pro performed well compared to the Quad G5 with both Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7.0 despite running under Rosetta emulation on the Mac Pro. Universal upgrades to these applications should provide additional performance boosts.

Meanwhile, Universal applications iMovie HD 6, Final Cut Pro 5, FileMaker Pro 8.5 and Cinebench 9.5 generally showed substantial improvements even in the 2.66GHz Mac Pro vs the 2.5GHz PowerMac.

There's no doubt that both versions of the Mac Pro are faster than the G5 Quad-Core running Universal Binary apps like iMovie, Final Cut Pro, etc. As you can see from the four UB tests we ran in this session, the Mac Pro 2.66GHz was as much as 62% faster than the Quad-Core G5/2.5GHz. The Mac Pro 3.0GHz was as much as 85% faster.
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Should we be surprised? I mean really this is good information, but it is does not really make me sit up and say "WOW". It is definitely interesting for the benchmarks. Thank you Steve for making the switch to Intel!
 
Buschmaster said:
Was there any doubt it wouldn't be a lot faster? I mean, I know it was already plenty fast, but come on...
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Well, not all gigahertz are created equally, and not apps are universal.
 
I still love my PowerPC Mac. I'm gonna shed a tear some day when I retire it. This thing is rock solid and fast (enough) 😎
 
Danksi said:
My main interest is in FCP the FCP results.

On a fixed budget, does anyone know the advantage/disadvantage of going for the 2.0Ghz with 1900XT over 2.6Ghz with the std video card?
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I think movie editing depends a lot on the speed of the disk subsystem. After all Mini DV is 12GB per hour. That's a of data. When yo "scrub" a shot all that data has to move off the disk and onto the video card. Even with 16MB of RAM not much of the video data can be help in RAM. So the G5 and Intel machine have disks that are about the same speed. Speed of a disk is measured by how fast the bit fly under the read/write head not the interface speed. So I am not surprized the Intel Mac Pro is not hugly faster for video.
 
Cooknn said:
I still love my PowerPC Mac. I'm gonna shed a tear some day when I retire it. This thing is rock solid and fast (enough) 😎
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I agree, Especially considering the fact that 4 months before I bought it, I was running on a Pentium 450 as a primary computer.

My goal is to buy a Quad G5 before the end of the year. I already have what is arguably the fastest 68k Mac (look at screen name for a clue) so I would like to also own the fastest PowerPC Mac Apple sold too.
 
That's great that Adobe apps runs well under Rosetta in the new Mac Pro.
It makes very tempting to buy one.
My only concern comes to any Rev.A of any hardware.
I'll wait and buy the next version of Mac Pro. I think then, even under Rosetta Adobe apps will fly in comparison to the Quad G5. Can't wait for the universal apps though.
 
MovieCutter said:
Still waiting for game benchmarks...
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I think you will be happy with rather amazing performance boost you will see from WoW in the near future when running on a Mac Pro (it isn't all a result of just hardware either). Expect other games to improve as well.
 
FF_productions said:
Video cards won't make a difference in FCP as of now if that's what you are asking performance wise. If you are using Motion/Games, anything that really feeds off the video card, then I'd go for the higher end video card.

Otherwise I'd go for the 2.6 ghz.
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If Cloverton is a drop-in chip, I'd say definitely go for the 2.0 GHz as it appears to be upgradeable.
 
FF_productions said:
When rendering in FCP, it's all about the CPU.

Fast hard drives contribute to real-time effects, but do NOT contribute to rendering.

Ram helps a little bit.
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However, depending on what kind of rendering you're doing, the hard drive can be a limiting factor.

Say you're just rendering ten minutes worth of a blur effect on video—the CPU says 'gimme all you got' and goes to town on the frames, blurring each one quickly. But the hard drive may have a hard time keeping up with the CPU, because 10 minutes of footage needs to be read, then re-written to the drive. For HD-resolution video, that can be a couple gigs of data. And that data also has to pass through the RAM (which acts like a high-speed buffer).

However, in the case of these benchmarks, one would think the testers would choose some more CPU-intense rendering, which would allow the hard drive to take it's time while the CPU is overloaded with work.

But, to anyone configuring a graphics or video workstation: Everything—CPU, Hard Drives, RAM, and even the GPU for some tasks—should be as fast and ample as possible. "A chain is only as good as it's weakest link." If you pair up a Quad 3.0 GHz Xeon with a 5400 rpm USB 2.0 drive, you will be disappointed.
 
this is the paragraph from the article that makes more sense for Adobe users on the quad G5:

"SHOULD YOU BUY A MAC PRO?
Should you buy a new Mac Pro or a closeout or refurbished Quad-Core G5? If cost is a factor and you use non-UB pro apps (like Photoshop CS2), then we think the Quad-Core G5 is still a valid choice. After all, you can sell it on eBay when Photoshop CS3 is released and buy next year's "Octo-Core" Mac Pro."

It makes me itching now. I want a Mac Pro! 😱
But I think wait for the "Octo-Core" will be rewarding alongside Adobe CS3.
 
gugy said:
That's great that Adobe apps runs well under Rosetta in the new Mac Pro.
It makes very tempting to buy one.
My only concern comes to any Rev.A of any hardware.
I'll wait and buy the next version of Mac Pro. I think then, even under Rosetta Adobe apps will fly in comparison to the Quad G5. Can't wait for the universal apps though.
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Always a judicious choice. I know that my Dad had about 6 months of little gripes with his DP G5 (1st generation) because of fan and 'buzzing' problems. He was kind of a 'beta tester' of the new hardware until a firmware update fixed his main problems.

Plus, if the 1st generation turns out to be reliable, you could get a used 1st gen. machine for a nice deal once the 2nd gen. machines are released!
 
mmmcheese said:
(sideshow bob)The Power PC...The!!!(/sideshow bob)
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Bravo.

I don't know what ROFL stands for, but from context-clues, I'm thinking it means pretty damn funny. In which case, ROFL, dude.
 
lord patton said:
Bravo.

I don't know what ROFL stands for, but from context-clues, I'm thinking it means pretty damn funny. In which case, ROFL, dude.
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Rolling On Floor Laughing
 
G5's not long for this cache intensive world!

This poor cache design will kill off the G5's fast in rendering intensive workspaces.

The G5 has only 1MB of cache and it's per core not per cpu. If one core needs to cache 3.5MB of data it's possible on the Mac Pro becauce the CPU cache is fully unified.

I just ran Cinebench 9.5 on my Mac Pro and got 4 Cpu's Showing and a healthy 3.5 Ratio. (That means the CPU's are working together very well, thanks to the Intel Smart Cache.)

🙂 😛
 
iGary said:
I would have thought that the Final Cut Pro benchmark would have really blown away the G5 - not so much, right?

Awesome on FileMaker and I can't wait to see how this stuff runs Adobe PS Natively.
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You're right. I'm extremely unimpressed that the fastest xeon only days old is actually slower mhz for mhz than a G5 that is pushing 4 year old technology. Really sad.

However it's bizarre that AE was actually faster under rosetta. I gotta think these tests were'nt very accurrate.
 
Buschmaster said:
Was there any doubt it wouldn't be a lot faster? I mean, I know it was already plenty fast, but come on...
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But it's not faster. Slower actually than the G5 at some apps. What's everyone looking at anyway? I'm pretty unimpressed. Other than Adobe's usage of cache (AE is a cache lover and will use all of it, hence the faster performance).

But the actual xeon processors are only as fast as the G5 processors. Look at the average specs... the 2.66 machines are only a teeny bit faster than the G5s except in a few apps like filemaker. But not in the biggies like Final Cut Pro where it actually appears that mhz for mhz the G5 is a faster machine hands down!
 
i went to my local apple store, and holy crap the thing is really fast. I'm tempted to get one, instead of an iMac, the only thing that's holding me back is the size.
 
That FCP test, sorry to say is a joke. Nobody cares about dropping in strange footage into a timeline with different attributes and rendering it.

Most of the time you drop footage that matches your timeline. In other words you don't drop DV25 footage into Uncompressed 10bit timelines unless that is all you have for the footage.

They should have added some color correction and maybe a motion effect and then rendered it. Oh well.

-mark
 
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