Very, Very, VERY, fast. Quiet, well designed.
Written: Oct 24 '04 (Updated Jan 21 '05)
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Pros: OS X (unix rock solid stability), PPC970FX CPU's, 64 bit future, system bandwidth, design/quality
Cons: Price is high. (that's pretty much it)
The Bottom Line: The premier Unix workstation (for the consumer). This is no home computer; large enterprise business uses the same machine (PPC970), and so does the US Army.
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| ssamaha's Full Review: Apple Power Mac G5 Dual (M9457LL/A) Mac Desktop |
This review will evolve as my experience with this Mac evolves. I am coming from a Dual 500 G4, and a PB G4 1.0GHz so the performance leap has been quite impressive. Having said that, I have been playing around with a dual 2.0 also at a friends place which is what finally got me to the point where I had to have my own.
Summary:
Basically, this is a Rev B PMG5, with liquid/radiator cooled dual 2.5 PPC970's (64 bit baby brothers of the IBM Power4 supercomputer chip), uses a 1100mhz system bus, 400mhz memory, and 150mbs SATA for storage. Its anywhere between 10-25% faster than the Dual 2.0, depending on the app (which the dual 2.0 is already a fast machine to start), and about as quite if not more so due to the liquid cooling system. It's packaged in what I believe is the best looking, best built, and best designed computer case ever made. Built like a tank, and functional all at once. When I added a second hard drive, and more memory, it could have gone any easier. One problem was in replacing PCI card screws, as the case tends to get in the way and you can easily drop the screw inside the case if you're not careful.
The hard drive actually slides in on little riders provided inside the case, which is very nice, no more messing around with screw mounts.
For your $2999, included is the CPU Box, a getting started with OS X Panther booklet, a small booklet on the CPU box and installing additional hardware, and warranty papers, plus the obligatory 2 apple stickers!
You also get your keyboard and mouse (which I chose the bluetooth option for less wires). Not much else. You don't get a firewire cable which would be nice for transferring data between your old mac and your new one. This feature is nice in the newer macs in that they will "suck" all of the old data and prefs from your old machine into them.
With the Apple monitor, you'll get the power brick, and a 3-way cable to attach to the computer. The monitor also comes with a small booklet and a nice dust cloth.
Build Quality: (added 11/23/04)
I cannot emphasize the physical quality, and beauty of this machine. Compared to the vast majority of over designed under built plastic monsters that HP, Gateway, Dell and the rest put out, this is a work of art. Sony is the only PC brand to come close (and still miss by a mile) in the design department on their PC. I best liken it to a the design and build quality of a Chevy (PC) to a BMW (Mac).
The machine is made of high grade, anodized aluminum and is solid as a tank. Weight is close to 50lbs with my built in options, and the size is on the large side, but you need it for the additional cooling fans and space for heat dissipation. The front and back is perforated to allow for an continuous airflow front to back for the various cooling zones. You can remove one entire side of the machine in the form of a single panel made of one continuous piece of 2mm thick aluminum. There is then a high grade plastic cover inside that allows you to run it with this metal cover removed for a short duration. Amazing! The uncluttered look of the inside bodes well for the overall superior design of this machine.
The screen is also made in an amazing manor with it's large milled aluminum stand which is mounted with a what I can best describe as an aircraft grade hinge mount. Understated as with the rest of the system, it gets out of your way so you can focus on the application you're running.
Finally, my Blue tooth keyboard and mouse, look great, and function well. Some prefer 3rd party keys and mouse, I like the Apple stuff, and it's simplicity.
Benchmarking:
First off, don't listen to all the BS about how much faster PC's are just because they get better frame rates in certain 3D games, etc.. the fact is, that every one of those games is first written, coded, optimized and tested on a PC (this is for obvious reasons, as 95%+ of the market is PC!), then of those games, the ones that a)are portable, and b)are profitable due to popularity are then "ported" to the MAC by a company like Aspyer which does little more than translate the PC code to Mac in the most economical way possible in order to keep the cost of these games below $50. Take for example the new Doom3 which was written for PC as a single threaded game, the Dual Mac can run multi-threaded apps, but the cost to rewrite the 3D Engine for this game to run on a G5 is prohibitive and this is why the game will always run faster on a 3.6GHz P4 than a 2.5GHz G5. Take Photoshop, Vectorworks, or Fincal Cutpro on the other hand and you can see where the mac is a speed demon. The problem is that there is little economic benefit in optimizing a game or many inexpensive apps to the mac (Altivec, SMP, etc..) which is a sad but true part of owning a Mac.
Now, onto my benchmarks..
Running X-Bench (which didn't do the best job of testing the OpenGL and graphics) the average score we got on the Dual 2.0 was 235, while the average on the dual 2.5 was 252, only about 7% more, but this shows where X-bench needs updating, as the additional speed of the system bus wasn't even noticed (it was reported as only 1Ghz, rather than 1.25). Testing with Photoshop CS using an identical file, we came up with 16% speed improvement (with the G5 plug-in). In FCP4 we rendered the same 100MB video file, and the 2.5 came in 21% faster, quite amazing. Subjectively however, the 2.5 didn't feel much faster than the 2.0 in so far as the non-CPU intensive tasks are concerned, MS Word, Finder, Safari etc.... There is A LOT of room for this machine to grow and get faster over time. As improvements in OS X take better advantage of the G5 cpu and todays higher performance GPU's. Tiger (OS X.4) will use more of the GPU for graphics (2D/3D) than even 10.3 and therefore unload the CPU's even more for other tasks.
Options that I added to this machine to really boost performance were (and I'll try to explain why):
Western Digital 10000RPM (over 70mbs) Raptor 74GB Drive that I use for my OS X System and Applications. The new PMG5 uses SATA (Serial ATA) bus for the hard drives, which allows for 150mbs of data flow. Generally, in the older Macs, you had a data bottle neck when you were opening a large file using an application like Photoshop or FCP, especially if the files were all on the same disk. By getting separate drives in SATA, you are able to run a two lane highway at full speed (my Raptor is 80mbs max) AT THE SAME TIME, which significantly increases data flow to the CPU and RAM. I am then using the Apple provided Maxtor MaxLine II 250GB Drive (a fast drive itself) for all of my data files, except for my FCP files which live on a dedicated LaCie firewire drive, as those large video file can lead to fragmentation that even OS X journaling can't manage well.
I also got the gorgeous Apple 23" Display that was recently introduced. With a .258 dot pitch and 270/cd brightness (that's very bright), it's second to very few screens available out there in most respects. It's pricey however at $1999, but well worth it and it looks great with the G5 tower. Complaints about it are it's price and the "lack of features" like digital audio out etc.. but the Mac G5 has optical digital audio, so who needs to clutter a great looking screen with inputs etc.. It does however have two USB 2.0 and 2 FireWire 400 outs.
I just took delivery of the Nvidia (NV40) Geforce6800 Ultra 256MB graphics card which will really be appreciated when Tiger (10.4) comes out with it's core image graphical acceleration and 2D Quartz Extreme. I got this card, not because I "needed" the worlds most powerful 3D graphics, but because it will allow my system to grow with all of the changes in OS X that will allow more of the Video and Graphics to be rendered entirely inside the GPU and thus alleviate the CPU(s) for more important tasks.
Finally, an option I cannot recommend enough is RAM.. I got as much as I could afford at this point, which is 8X512MB = 4GB... down the road when 1GB Sticks get less expensive, I'll trade in my 512's and go to 8GB.. OS X is RAM hungry... not in a bad way, but rather in a good way. It will use all of the RAM you give it (unlike widows which is limited to 1.5 or 2GB). This makes a Mac with lots of RAM very snappy, responsive and able to multitask like the supercomputers of recent years.
In the end, this is the fastest Mac, really the fastest consumer Unix workstation out there (Sun & SGI aren't really consumer oriented) and in the top 3 of the fastest "desk top" computers made today, second to none in bandwidth, (top end Opertron, and Xeon 3.06 are the only competition), and probably for a little while as the 90nm process is running into a GHz brick wall, and IBM is having a hard time (along with Intel) at making these chips reliably.
Its not cheap, (if you want cheap, get a PC), but it's totally satisfying.
Added 1/20/05:
Here is a photo collection of my G5 setup and some internal shots of the machine taken recently.
http://homepage.mac.com/sjsamaha/PhotoAlbum4.html
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 7000
Operating System: Unix
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: SuperDisk
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
ssamaha
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Location: Scottsdale,AZ
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Pilot, BS Finance, Computer Geek
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