Which is faster My Quad 2.5 Ghz G5 or the new 27" imac?

[Little Endian]

I'm thinking about purchasing a new 27" imac 2.66 Ghz i5 or the 2.8Ghz i7 option, but I would like opinions about how much faster it would be compared to my 4 year old Quad 2.5 Ghz Power Mac G5.

My Quad 2.5 G5 has 4Gb of ram and a Nvidia Geforce 7800GT GPU. For comparison this setup is faster in almost every single way compared to my Unibody 15" MBP 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, with 9600M GT. In many cases the G5 is easily twice as fast, and in few Rosetta app situations it is 3-5 times faster.

So the question is, if I replace my Power Mac G5 with a new quad core i5 or i7 imac, will I finally see performance gains that could justify replacing my trusty G5 or must I buy a new Mac Pro to see performance gains that are considerably better.

I would rather not purchase a quad or Octo core Mac Pro as the imac seems to be much more cost effective, however I have not been able to find any benchmarks that effectively compare the Quad G5s to the latest Intel offerings. Any advice or opinions would be helpful.

 

[Matthew Yohe]

I'm thinking about purchasing a new 27" imac 2.66 Ghz i5 or the 2.8Ghz i7 option, but I would like opinions about how much faster it would be compared to my 4 year old Quad 2.5 Ghz Power Mac G5.

My Quad 2.5 G5 has 4Gb of ram and a Nvidia Geforce 7800GT GPU. For comparison this setup is faster in almost every single way compared to my Unibody 15" MBP 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, with 9600M GT. In many cases the G5 is easily twice as fast, and in few Rosetta app situations it is 3-5 times faster.

So the question is, if I replace my Power Mac G5 with a new quad core i5 or i7 imac, will I finally see performance gains that could justify replacing my trusty G5 or must I buy a new Mac Pro to see performance gains that are considerably better.

I would rather not purchase a quad or Octo core Mac Pro as the imac seems to be much more cost effective, however I have not been able to find any benchmarks that effectively compare the Quad G5s to the latest Intel offerings. Any advice or opinions would be helpful.

http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/mac-benchmarks/

 

[21ce]

http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/mac-benchmarks/

why does it claim the 2009 mac pros to have 16 cores?! Am I missing something?

 

[nek]

http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/mac-benchmarks/

That shows that the last gen 3.06GHz iMac should be noticeably faster than the Quad 2.5GHz G5. And the i5 or i7 will be faster still. There aren't any Mac reviews yet, but a PC comparison of the 3.33GHz Core 2 Duo to the i5 and i7 shows that the fastest of new iMacs would be a good upgrade choice:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3641&p=2

 

[gugucom]

why does it claim the 2009 mac pros to have 16 cores?! Am I missing something?

Hyperthreading. So they are talking virtual cores.

 

[21ce]

Hyperthreading. So they are talking virtual cores.

Thank you, I didn't realize this

 

[SydneyDev]

I think the iMac would be a cost effective upgrade, but there will probably be a Mac Pro with 12 cores released early next year. That is 3 times more CPU power than the iMac. This is based on Intel's new 6-core Xeons being available.

 

[300D]

That shows that the last gen 3.06GHz iMac should be noticeably faster than the Quad 2.5GHz G5

This information is based on a very flawed benchmarking utility that focuses only on CPU, memory and drive performance. Depending on which GPU you have, the quad G5 will be faster than any C2D machine.

It will be slower than an i5 an i7 iMac and all Mac Pros but the quad 2.0ghz.