Baggss...G5 Quad update?

Baggss, I've been thinking about purchasing a G5 powermac to compliment my recent iBook purchase. Since I know you have recently purchased a quad, I was hoping for your review/comments on your new toy. Thanks!

Considering that I upgraded from a 1.3Ghz G4, this is like night and day. The G4 had a 100Mhz bus, which what ultimately became the bottleneck, and couldn't really take advantage of new, fast drives. This thing has the 1.25Ghz bus and utilizes only SATA drives, no IDE interface built in.

So far I have no complaints, it's nice to have Apps open in one or less than once bounce and to have things like iTunes and iPhoto open fast (they both took forever on the G4, mainly due tot he size of their respective libraries). Have not had any problems with the hardware. Bought it with 1Gb of RAM and then immediately added a 2nd. All can really say is FAST, and I mean FAST.

The one area I have used where performance has really shown, and which utilizes all 4 processors intensively, has been ripping DVDs for my iPod. The G4 took 4 to 8 hours for a regular DVD, H.264, Single pass. My ibook takes 2 - 4 hours. The Quad takes about 25 min or so. That is what I am talking about.

If you have any more specific questions. let me know.

baggss, what program are you using to rip the DVD's for your iPod? Is it Handbrake by any chance? Curious as I just did some speed compairsons with the old Mac Mini with the G4 and my new Macs.

Yep, Handbrake 0.7.0 it is....

Then that is one fast machine. My iMac g5 2.1 Ghz with 1.5GB ram takes around 1 hour 50 minutes with the Power settings on Max, the new Core Duo Mini takes just 55 minutes for the same movie. That Quad really cuts down the time!

What I love is that it uses upwards of 85% of all 4 cores to do it. It''s the one thing I have tried to date that will actually use as much of all 4 cores as it can get. It averages 98 fps when ripping, going as high as 130 or as low as 55 depending on what else I am doing while it's ripping.

I don't mean to bump this thread, but I have been debating on whether to get a PPC tower (like the Quad) or wait to see if an intel version appears. Has anyone thought much about this? A quad will obviously last me a long time and serve my needs 200%, but will Apples support of PPC expire long before the useful life of the quad? Certainly a tower of this magnitute is going to be a but kicker regardless of the processor so I am not worried about benchmark comparisons between chipsets, I just want some security for my investment. Any thoughts? PPC or wait for Intel? (serious and non-inflamatory responses only please, I am not trolling for heated chip debates, thanks)

I suspect Apple will be supporting the PPC user base for the next 3 to 6 years. I gave this a lot of thought before I bought the Quad, but I don't expect them to dump the PPC support anytime soon, otherwise they would not be pushing the whole "universal binary" thing. I did not want to wait for the Intel PM replacement for a number of reasons, not the least of which that it will likely be a new chip on a new board. By the time they get all of the issues worked out and a good Rev B or Rev C machine is out, it would be over a year before I could have or would have upgraded.

baggss said:

...By the time they get all of the issues worked out and a good Rev B or Rev C machine is out, it would be over a year before I could have or would have upgraded.

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That is probably the best case I have heard argued yet. Thank you for that.