Stupid but needed question

I presently use a single 1.8 ghz G5. Can someone please tell me the speed gain I will get by purchasing the 3.0 quad or the 3.0 8 core. I am sorry to ask such a basic question but I spend my time using these darn things (photographer - Photoshop) so I don't have a real good base of tech knowledge. Thanks.

i cant give you any specific examples but basically your computing will go from good to crazy fast.....the quad and 8 core might even be too much computer if you are just doing photoshop
-chris

Well I shoot Large Format images that are around 600 megs. Some glaciers move faster than the processing of these files. FYI, I am using Photoshop CS with 1 meg of RAM.

Redlight said:

Well I shoot Large Format images that are around 600 megs. Some glaciers move faster than the processing of these files. FYI, I am using Photoshop CS with 1 meg of RAM.

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i hope you mean gig, because if you're using 1 meg, thats your problem right there the mac pro will be a very good upgrade for you. There is no such thing as too much power.

Gig would be accurate.

I guess I am looking for some quantitative answer such as 23x faster or 50 times faster. A LOT faster or MUCH faster doesn't really tell me much.

I don't think your going to get that here, or possibly anywhere.

I can not tell you for sure how much the 8 core would be, but the 4 core, is 1.4 times faster then the G5 quad. The G5 Quad has 4 G5's in it operating at 2.5ghz each. Your computer has a single G5 running at 1.8... so although we do not have actual numbers, it is a significant increase of power.

Thanks. I just wanted some sense of what speed improvement there would be. I appreciate the info.

http://www.garydwhalen.com

I'm sure it depends on how the application works, but I have a g5 1 x 1.8 and a quad 2.66, and the quad blows the G5 away in some apps, but in others you don't see much difference.

The big differences are things like video ripping - handbrake for example, which I use to rip my DVDs to mp4 to put on my Ipod, absolutely flies on the quad. It runs roughly 10 x the speed of the G5.

At the moment the quad is a bit short of RAM too, it only has the standard 1gb. I don't know if more RAM will speed things up more.

Hard disk intensive things don't make much difference - I did some heavy rearranging of files last weekend, moving blocks of 50 - 100gb or so around the disks, and that wasn't noticeably faster than it would be on the G5. No surprise though, clearly that's limited by the speed of the disks, it doesn't need much processor power.

But the answer is really that some things are much faster, some are about the same, but I haven't found anything slower.

On the other hand, unfortunately I have to say that in my experience it's not the 23x or 50x you were looking for. Maybe when apps are written specifically to use the multiple cores things will perk up, but the leap isn't as big as that.

I'm very pleased with it, it was well worth buying as far as I'm concerned, but mines just my home PC. I don't do any 'work' on it at all, so I may not be as critical as others.

Redlight said:

Well I shoot Large Format images that are around 600 megs.

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wo ! nice size !

i wouldnt know the figures but your computing would definatly speed up.

If you went with the Mac Pro, you would also gain performance speed by upgrading to Photoshop CS3. On Intel-based Macs, Adobe CS and CS2 apps will only run under Rosetta emulation and from what I have read here and there, it seems to slow things down considerably.

Thanks to all of you. I am hoping that when Leopard comes out it will take better advantage of the quad and 8 core processors. That said, I need one now and I guess the 3.0 quad will work very well for what I do. Regardless it will work much better than what I have now. Isn't it odd though. Three years ago when I bought the 1.8 is was dubbed as the newest SUPER computer.

And the CS3 advice is well received and will certainly go that route.

Redlight said:

Thanks to all of you. I am hoping that when Leopard comes out it will take better advantage of the quad and 8 core processors. That said, I need one now and I guess the 3.0 quad will work very well for what I do. Regardless it will work much better than what I have now. Isn't it odd though. Three years ago when I bought the 1.8 is was dubbed as the newest SUPER computer.

And the CS3 advice is well received and will certainly go that route.

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Well, it was pretty fast at the time. 3 years is a long time in computing!

jonnyd said:

Well, it was pretty fast at the time. 3 years is a long time in computing!

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Isn't that the truth these days? You blink and you're behind again!

Crud I winked, I'm now behind half a step...noooooooooooooooo

Well I bought my first computer in 1981. Dual floppy disks. Constantly switching them out from program to files. Also remember the 1200 baud rate on my modem. Osborne computer with amber screen. Then "upgraded" to a Texas Instruments followed by a REAL IBM. So, I have seen the speed increase so that they could handle the bloated software.