Surprising Performance...

[Dronecatcher]

Whenever I've snagged another Mac off bay or wherever, I always go to EveryMac to compare the benchmark with other Macs to try and estimate performance but sometimes get a pleasant surprise at how well a machine runs - or a shock at how poorly it does.

In the past I've been surprised by these Macs:

G3 400Mhz Pismo Powerbook
G5 2.1Ghz iMac
G4 17" DLSD Powerbook

I'm not talking about benchmarks but just general feel and/or specific abilities.
The Pismo and DLSD just felt like faster machines than they should be and the iMac plays 720P in Front Row, which for Quicktime is a big stretch.

I'd also mention Virtual PC 4 performance on OS9 Macs being an eye opener too - even my 300Mhz iBook can run Win95 reasonably.

Conversely, I've been disappointed too. After owning a 1.33 12" Powerbook for a while I got the 1.5Ghz version with more RAM too - despite benchmarking higher, it never felt as fast as the 1.33.

Has anyone had any similar experiences or done something on their Mac that they didn't think they'd be able to do?

 

[eyoungren]

Whenever I've snagged another Mac off bay or wherever, I always go to EveryMac to compare the benchmark with other Macs to try and estimate performance but sometimes get a pleasant surprise at how well a machine runs - or a shock at how poorly it does.

In the past I've been surprised by these Macs:

G3 400Mhz Pismo Powerbook
G5 2.1Ghz iMac
G4 17" DLSD Powerbook

I'm not talking about benchmarks but just general feel and/or specific abilities.
The Pismo and DLSD just felt like faster machines than they should be and the iMac plays 720P in Front Row, which for Quicktime is a big stretch.

I'd also mention Virtual PC 4 performance on OS9 Macs being an eye opener too - even my 300Mhz iBook can run Win95 reasonably.

Conversely, I've been disappointed too. After owning a 1.33 12" Powerbook for a while I got the 1.5Ghz version with more RAM too - despite benchmarking higher, it never felt as fast as the 1.33.

Has anyone had any similar experiences or done something on their Mac that they didn't think they'd be able to do?

My son's 1Ghz DVI TiBook running Leopard with only 1GB ram.

Probably because of the cache, but the damn thing was a rocket, even on Leopard.

Kind of envied him, even though I have a 17" PB with 2GB ram (1.0Ghz with cache). It always felt kind of faster than mine.

 

[Hrududu]

A couple machines have impressed me:

DVI Titanium PowerBooks. Have a 667, 867, and 1GHz version of the DVI books and they all perform much better than expected based on clock speed alone. I truly believe this has more to do with the L3 cache than anything.

June 2004 Dual PowerMac G5: Despite owning faster G5s, both of the dual 2.0 June 04s I have had were very good performing machines.

1.5GHz 12" PowerBook G4: Have got 2 of these little dudes now, and both are super fast IMO. I had an original 867 which was a dog, but these things with their Core Image support GPU and a full 1.25GB of RAM are totally usable machines.

Dual MDD G4s. Have both the 1.25 and 1.42 systems and they are REALLY quick. Daily use with CS4, iTunes, and the internet these machines don't feel much slower than the dual 2.0 G5 to me. With fast 7200rpm HDDs and a good network connection, I voted these to be the oldest machines I would consider using full time for a month.

Some of the WORST performing systems would include: 1GHz "17 iMac G4 USB 1.1, the pre USB 2.0 eMacs, Mac Mini G4, and in my case, my personal 1.67 DLSD 17" PowerBook. Even with a new HDD and 2GB of RAM its just not fast at all. If not for the screen real estate, I'd grab the 1GHz TiBook over it any day.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Large cached machines certainly do have an edge.

Probably because of the cache, but the damn thing was a rocket, even on Leopard.

Have a 667, 867, and 1GHz version of the DVI books and they all perform much better than expected based on clock speed alone. I truly believe this has more to do with the L3 cache than anything.

Totally agree, I had a 667 DVI and the Dual 1.25 MDD with 2Mb L3 - amazing difference that cache makes.

 

[AphoticD]

From my experience;

My Dual Core G5 2.0Ghz (Late 2005) booted and launched apps quicker, rendered graphics and crunched audio substantially faster, while operating cooler and quieter than my Dual CPU G5 2.0Ghz from 2003. Faster RAM, larger caches and PCIe busses outperform the earlier design. I've since put a 2.3Ghz DC CPU in this G5 and it performs solid.

I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of my Mac Mini G4 1.42Ghz with 1GB RAM and a non-CoreImage 32MB Radeon 9200 GPU. I was expecting it to feel much slower than my PBG4 15" 1.5Ghz with 2GB of RAM and a 64MB Radeon Mobility 9700 GPU. In some cases, the mini actually feels "snappier".

My PBG4 17" 1.67Ghz with 2GB RAM and a 128MB Radeon Mobility 9700 also surprised me when I first used it. Not only is the standard (non-HiRes) screen gloriously vibrant and responsive, the whole machine feels so much quicker than my 15" PBG4 1.5Ghz. It is certainly more than just a ~10% increase as the specs would indicate.

It's also worth noting that on nearly all Macs, blowing out the dust and grime, then performing a clean-up and re-application of thermal paste (and pads/shims) will make a big improvement on performance as the built in controllers will often be quietly throttling CPU, system bus and RAM speeds in a hot running Mac.

Also, HDD and SSD performance will degrade with heat and time, so two same spec'ed Macs with different usage patterns can show different performance based on how hot and worn their components have run over time.

 

[dpny]

From my experience;

My Dual Core G5 2.0Ghz (Late 2005) booted and launched apps quicker, rendered graphics and crunched audio substantially faster, while operating cooler and quieter than my Dual CPU G5 2.0Ghz from 2003. Faster RAM, larger caches and PCIe busses outperform the earlier design. I've since put a 2.3Ghz DC CPU in this G5 and it performs solid.

The extra two cores and water cooling may have had a little to do with that. Realistically, you needed water cooling to keep a G5 quiet. They're essentially server chips, and were never meant to run quiet and cool.

 

[bunnspecial]

The extra two cores and water cooling may have had a little to do with that. Realistically, you needed water cooling to keep a G5 quiet. They're essentially server chips, and were never meant to run quiet and cool.

Apple did not make any liquid cooled G5s that were slower than 2.5ghz.

The liquid cooled G5s were the dual 2.5, dual 2.7, and quad 2.5.

The dual core 2.0 and 2.3, like their dual processor predecessors, were air cooled.

 

[dpny]

Apple did not make any liquid cooled G5s that were slower than 2.5ghz.

The liquid cooled G5s were the dual 2.5, dual 2.7, and quad 2.5.

The dual core 2.0 and 2.3, like their dual processor predecessors, were air cooled.

My mistake: I misread "Dual Core G5 2.0Ghz" as "2.5GHz".

 

[AphoticD]

My mistake: I misread "Dual Core G5 2.0Ghz" as "2.5GHz".

Yes, I would expect twice the cores to provide more speed too.

But as I was getting at, the Dual Core G5 was a pleasantly noticeable improvement upon the Dual processor (single-core) machines from mid '05 and earlier, even though they had the same clock speed.

I have never owned an LCS G5, so I can't say how well this performs or how quiet it is in comparison, but I believe I have hacked together one of the finest air-cooled PowerPC Macs ever:

Late 2005 PowerMac 11,2:
Dual-Core 970MP @ 2.3Ghz
16GB PC2-4200 DDR2 RAM
Quadro FX 4500 512MB PCIe
256GB KingSpec mSATA mini-PCIe SSD
(+ a 1TB WD Green 7200RPM spinner)

It runs quieter than any other G5 I've owned. But not as quiet as my Mac Pro 3,1.

Time to boot Leopard 10.5.8 today: 33.5 seconds from chime to a ready Desktop (with the clock showing in the menu bar). This is with Sharing options all switched off to speed up the boot.

My only "Let's max it out" gripe is that the mSATA SSD is on the standard SATA bus. I need to source a bootable PCIe SATA II card next. My understanding is that the expensive FirmTek SATA II PCIe cards will work, but has anyone had luck with getting the G5 to boot off a 'generic' branded card or particular chipset?

 

[dpny]

I have never owned an LCS G5, so I can't say how well this performs or how quiet it is in comparison, but I believe I have hacked together one of the finest air-cooled PowerPC Macs ever:

Mildy off-topic, but what do you use it for? I finally got rid of my DP G5 because I couldn't find a use for it, and I live in an apartment and just don't have the room to have a ton of extra machines around I'm not actually using. At the moment my Mac Pro 5,1 has Ubuntu on it, but even it doesn't get a lot of use since I got a MBP.

 

[benwild_33]

The only PowerPC Mac I've had that I've been really surprised with the speed of was my Dual Core 2.0GHz PowerMac G5, it has 6GB DDR2 and I put an SSD in it. In terms of opening apps and navigating around the OS it didn't feel much slower than my 12 Core Mac Pro. The only area I noticed I was using powerPC was when I went on the web. I was really impressed, I have owned other G5s in the past (2x Dual 1.8s and a Dual 2.5) and neither of those felt anywhere near as snappy.

My Dual Processor G4 feels pretty sluggish around the OS, especially in Leopard although i think that may be due to my insistence on using mechanical drives in it, I have an SSD on my desk that I am tempted to try out in it.

 

[AphoticD]

Mildy off-topic, but what do you use it for? I finally got rid of my DP G5 because I couldn't find a use for it, and I live in an apartment and just don't have the room to have a ton of extra machines around I'm not actually using. At the moment my Mac Pro 5,1 has Ubuntu on it, but even it doesn't get a lot of use since I got a MBP.

Well, I don't run the G5s every day (mostly due to the cost of power and the heat they produce!) but I have made a conscious effort to keep these beautiful PowerPCs relevant.

I have a triple boot setup on the DC G5 with Ubuntu Mate 16.04, Leopard and Tiger. It performs perfectly under all three systems without any signs of being overloaded with whatever I throw at it.

Ubuntu MATE:
*Full desktop OS with all the development tools I can think of.
*KVM/virt-manager for running multiple instances of other Linux distros. Currently I have Debian 8 and Fedora Server 25 ppc64 VMs. These both run nearly as smooth as VMWare Fusion would on the Mac Pro with the x86_64 equivalent flavours (except for the lack of 3D acceleration). Fedora Server as a VM is a great option as a web development production server because of the stylish Cockpit web interface. But I prefer Ubuntu MATE as a desktop environment.

Leopard:
*Xcode and all the dev tools
*All my existing PowerPC audio production apps: ProTools LE, Reason, Ableton Live, Stylus RMX, Melodyne and a huge collection of NI stuff (Reaktor, Absynth, Massive, Guitar Rig and much more).
*I recently bought Final Cut Studio 2 boxed, which I intend to learn. I like that the software shipped with a thousand pages or more of documentation. You don't see that nowadays and it being outdated, was also only a fraction of the cost of FCPX (sans-printed docs).
*Adobe CS3. I like this version of Creative Suite best for web graphics, UI design and DTP.
* Web dev: Coda, Transmit, Espresso, TextWrangler.

Tiger:
*Classic support
*Testing and developing Tiger support for Cocoa programming.

I have this mostly duplicated on a DP 2.0 G5, less the Linux part. This works well for chaining DSP for audio plugins with MIDI synced over a gigabit LAN and should work well with Parallel processing Compressor for FCP (when I get there).

For audio, I have most of the paid Intel updates for my apps (except ProTools) to chain in the latest plugin sample libraries, Kontakt and an NI 49 key controller interface so I can put my Mac Pro and MacBook Unibody into the DAW mix with everything MIDI / trigger synced.

That was the long answer... Short answer is I get a strange satisfaction out of reviving and economizing older hardware and the late '05 G5 is the ultimate in my opinion.

 

[dpny]

Well, I don't run the G5s every day (mostly due to the cost of power and the heat they produce!) but I have made a conscious effort to keep these beautiful PowerPCs relevant. . .

Thanks.