Why do trolls patrol those forums? Argue about the negative, negative points of macs, where pc's have plenty? But PC users love their systems and would live with them, hoping that someone will solve the problems.
I think when you talk about processor speeds, you should look at the amount of data it processes in a single cycle, one byte if you will. This is the true power! Forget about how many polygons and FPS's - this is game talk!
Did you know, All macs are clockable? You'll need a soldering iron, tweezers and maybe a steady pair of hands. OK.. users haven't worked out how to OC a G5 but I bet someone out there is working on it. Sooner or later someone gonna work out the SMT settings for the G5's daughter board and relocated the SMT's that holds the secrets to G5 over-clocking, if you own one and you look at the traces on the back of the daughter board, you'll discover a group of 8 or 10 SMT resisters. Those are the mac equivalent of jumpers.
A stock G5 with it's liquid cooling system, a single clock cycle would process more data then any pc I know, on average about one mac cycle to one point five pc cycles (using the same class of processor and equivalent clock speed). When Mac's were talking about Gigaflops, PC's was still worrying about the megahertz rules, but AMD changed that. Then Apple started making Dual CPU systems, Intel adds 'hyper-threading' that fools applications that there are more real CPU's, adding to the work load. P4's can't be duelled due to it's design, unless your talking about P4 Xeons.
And memory capacity? Well Mac's have done it again! Addressing eight gigabytes while current PC's are stuck at four! Why? 32bit systems can only address four gigabytes. OK, server boards can address more but you can paying more than the price of a stock G5 for this luxury.
"Even elephants would be hard-pressed to keep track of as much data as the PowerPC G5. With up to 8GB of main memory, the Power Mac G5 can hold a gigantic 3D model, a complex scientific simulation or a sequence of HD video entirely in RAM — drastically reducing the time to access, modify and render such data. That’s 40 times more data between RAM and the processor. Theoretically, the G5 could address up to 18 billion billion bytes of virtual memory. Or 18 exabytes for short. But in practice, the PowerPC G5 has 42 bits of address space for memory, which means it supports just 2 or 4 terabytes of system memory. You can’t put that much RAM in a desktop computer — yet — but it sets the stage for untold computational feats."
For gamer and mac haters. Here's something to please and envy over...
ANALYSIS OF CPU INTENSIVE TESTS
Apple has made signficant strides with the G5 to catch up to the Windows PCs in performance. The Dual G5/2.0 was faster than any of the Windows PCs we tested in 4 out of 5 tests. It was a close second to the Dual Xeon/2.4 in that one test.
When we tested the faster G4 Power Mac 4 months ago, it only was fastest in one test.
Now before you PC fans send me flaming emails, we do plan to test a Dual 3GHz Xeon and 3.2GHz Pentium 4 in about a week. We do want to show the fastest PCs against the fastest Macs. This page is a moving target.
TEST NOTES & KUDOS
The Dual Athlon 2600+ (2.1GHz) system had 1GB of DDR memory and ran Windows XP.
The Dual 2.4GHz Xeon system had 2GB of PC2100 DDR (cas 2) memory and ran Windows XP Professional. (Hyper-threading was enabled.)
The 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 system had 2GB of 400MHz PC3200 DDR memory and ran Windows XP Professional. (Hyper-threading was enabled.)
Many thanks to Peter Ashford of ACCS for letting us play with his Pentium 4 and Xeon systems. Show your support for Peter by visiting his web site to check out his company's products and services.
Special thanks also, to John Moreland and the San Diego Supercomputer Center for putting me in touch with Peter and letting us use the Visualization Lab for some of our testing.
HYPERTHREADING
Both the Pentium and Xeon had hyper-threading turned on. It's an interesting and effective feature. When running Cinebench 2003 render, the application "thought" the Xeon had four processors. And the 3D render speeds with hyper-threading enabled were as much as 23% faster than when it was disabled.
Though the G4 supports multi-threading, it does NOT support hyper-threading.
The Apple Power Mac G5 models were borrowed for testing from anonymous sources. They were running Mac OS X (10.2.7). The Dual 2GHz G5 had 2GB of PC3200 DDR. The 1.6GHz G5 had 1.5GB of PC2700 DDR. The 1.8GHz G5 had 2GB of PC3200 DDR.
Photoshop 7.01 had the new G5 upgrade.
The Apple Power Mac 1.42GHz MP was purchased from Small Dog Electronics (SmallDog.com). It had 2GB of DDR 2700 memory and ran OS X (10.2.6).
Big Mahalo to ATI Technology who provided the Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards for all test systems.
source:
http://www.barefeats.com
Full article:
Power Mac G4 and G5 versus Pentium 4, Dual Xeon, and Dual Athlon
QUAKE3, UT2003, AND CINEBENCH fly-through
And....
from d4rr3n
My suggestions (assuming you have the choice):
You dont need to do these things, it's already a good system. Just a few suggestions to max it out.
Get a 2.4/2.6/2.8 C and overclock it, with proper cooling (and a tiny bit of luck with the 2.4) they should all be able to hit 3.2ghz. They will however be faster than the 3.2 because they have a higher FSB.
Get faster ram since you would be overclocking the FSB and would want the ram to rise in speed to match it....pc4200 would be good
2.4C are generally the best overclockers percentage wise since it has the lowest multiplier giving you more room to raise the fsb.
Get a better motherboard, one without integrated video (believe me you'll be kicking yourself for it later)
And lastly, whatever you do...DO NOT GET THE 9800XT especially for $400. The 9800pro is under $200 and is almost guaranteed to overclock to 9800xt specs. Besides, the nvidia 6800 non ultra is almost $100 less than the 9800XT and it wipes the floor with it.
Alternative system, if your gonna build for speed and games and liquid assets ain't a problem!!
• 2.8GHz LGA775 Pentium 4 (2.8GHz CPU running at 3.565GHz with 680MHz DDR2 memory bus)
• Abit AA8 DuraMax i925X Skt 775 800FSB, DDRII 533, PCI Express, SATA RAID, 6ch Audio, GB LAN, USB2, F/Wire ATX @ £ 104.95
• Corsair XMS2 Pro series DDR2 memory modules (CM2X512-5400C4PRO) x2 or (TWIN2X1024-5400C4PRO) for matched pair.
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800Ultra, PCI-Express version.
• Koolance Exos cooler or Custom built heat-sink with fans and a peltier tower.
Noob's asks 'what's a peltier?'
Personally.. both platforms are good... PC's for games and Mac for serious horse power when working with applications and in the business of making money without all the headaches.
I get why you trolls patrol... but not everyone wants to do the same things as you on their machines, there's more to life than games, games and games. Some people have money, if this envy you then go get a JOB or start a career if your capable! Have a life and earn some real liquid assets. Buy a island, have someone design and build a house to your specs, have a few fast sporty cars and super-bikes, build the fastest, most stable PC system and upgrade till you hearts content!
But i warrant this fact... You'll be installing windows a few times, lose data on occasions, suffer the odd crash or crashes, get various viruses, worms and install well hidden often unknown spyware applications that transmit your private info to marketing companies; that will spam you until you become corned beef. Don't expect the rest of us Mac users to waste valuable disk space installing virus killers so PC platform based binary bacteria won't hit your system or others like yours.
