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Now that I?ve gotten that rant out of the way, let?s look at the nuts and bolts of the Power Mac G5?s hardware. Poking around inside the machine, I noticed that Apple has sent us its best graphics card this time. Known for its usually second-rate graphics cards (perhaps the company is reluctant to offer a workstation-class graphics card for fear of being labeled a ?workstation? and then having to compete with other boxes with that same nomenclature), Apple has put a hot rod under the hood this time. It?s the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL, with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory on board. Even though its AGP 8x spec still falls far short of the best graphics cards available on the PC platform today, this $450 option is certainly better than the run-of-the-mill cards usually found inside Macs. The NVIDIA card is a behemoth, though, taking up the width of two slots, thus leaving just two expansion slots available. But the good thing is, its two DVI ports out back give you enough horsepower to run two of Apple?s 30-inch monitors. Now that?s what I call humongous screen real estate. The graphics coming out of this card were extraordinary and gave some fast refresh rates as well. Bravo, again.
After taking the scenic route through the insides of this veritable essay of industrial design, it was time to harness it to the test bench and see what it could do. For the first time ever, here at the Midwest Test Facility, could this new Mac beat the fastest PC? Well, yes and no. It came close, and beat our eight-month-old Dell dual Xeon 3.6GHz test machine in some of the benchmarks, but overall, it still isn?t as fast as our fastest, albeit elderly PC. It?s certainly telling that Intel?s Xeon chips from last year are still faster than the nearly speed-stuck IBM PowerPC chips inhabiting Macintoshes. We can only hope that somehow Apple will decide to start using Intel or even AMD chips in its computers and at the same time find a way to quickly and efficiently adapt all its magnificent software to a processor manufacturer that has proven to be a more dependable source of continuous speed and efficiency upgrades. It?s frustrating to see all this groundbreaking software innovation, such as the magnificent Final Cut Pro Studio (which I will soon be reviewing here on Digital Media Net), all brought to bear on a processor whose manufacturer for some reason can?t seem to upgrade it as fast as was once hoped. Irony of ironies, it?s IBM, that evil empire alluded to in Apple?s 1984 commercial so many years ago, that?s supplying these chips that can?t keep up and are holding Apple back from its true potential. All that said, it?s still worth it to use a Mac because of its excellent operating system, its futuristic industrial design, and its growing collection some of the best software in the world. Even better, the hardware and software are all now available at prices that are, at the high end, lower than those on the Windows platform.
Take a look at the table below, and you?ll see that on our battery of real-world After Effects benchmarks, the Mac won four of the tests, while the Xeon box won the other four. Was it a tie? Almost. When you add up the total seconds required to complete six of our original benchmarks (numbered 1-6 here), the Mac needed 432 seconds to complete them, while the PC only required 419. Looking further down the table, even with its juiced-up processors and that fancy NVIDIA graphics card, the Mac still couldn?t beat the PC in our CineBench tests. And yes, whining Mac fanatics, we did go to Energy Saver/Options and set processor performance at the highest level, which actually made the Power Mac slower on our battery of eight After Effects benchmarks and didn?t help much with the others, either. Included on the table below are the fastest scores from both settings. Next on the list were Brian Maffit?s TotalBenchmark tests, in which the Mac edged the PC on the first short test, but got solidly smacked down by a margin of 25% in the second, longer After Effects test.
| Results in minutes: seconds Boldface indicates winner | Boxx Technologies 3DBOXX R4.2, Dual AMD Opteron 248 (2.21GHz), 2GB 333 ECC DDR RAM ($5728) | Apple Mac G5, Dual 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR 400 SD RAM ($4398) | Dell Precision Workstation 470 Dual Intel Xeon 3.6, 2GB DDR2 RAM ($4639) | Apple Mac G5, Dual 2.7GHz, 4GB DDR 400 SD RAM ($4598) |
| 1. After Effects : Simple Animation | :03 | :06 | :03 | :05 |
| 2. After Effects : Video Composite | :46 | :42 | :37 | :40 |
| 3. After Effects : Data Project | 1:23 | 1:21 | 1:16 | 1:15 |
| 4. After Effects : Gambler | :21 | :23 | :19 | :17 |
| 5. After Effects : Source Shapes | 2:58 | 2:26 | 2:46 | 2:15 |
| 6. After Effects : Virtual Set | 2:19 | 2:49 | 1:58 | 2:36 |
| CineBench 2003 Rendering Time (lower is better) | 45.3 sec. | 45.3 sec. | 39.2 sec. | 40.0 sec. |
| CineBench 2003 Rendering (CB-CPU score -- higher is better) | 581 | 581 | 672 | 658 |
| TotalBenchmark comp 1 | not tested | 83 sec. | 83 sec. | 78 sec. |
| TotalBenchmark comp 2 | not tested | 1277 sec. | 960 sec. | 1202 sec. |
| Hard Disk Speed | Read: 121MB/sec. Write: 88MB/sec. | Not tested | Read: 130MB/sec. Write: 133MB/sec. | Read: 52MB/sec. Write: 66MB/sec. |
Sure, our benchmark suite is not the end-all of computer benchmarking, but it will show After Effects users, who might be agonizing over which computer to buy, which platform will be slightly faster. But it?s getting to be more of an academic exercise now, because the performance of both computers is just about the same. And, if you look at the prices, you get much more for your money with the dual-processor Mac these days than you do with a dual-processor Xeon PC. Even more significant is the fact that the price of this test Mac is unusually high, because Apple chose to include 4 GB of RAM, and added numerous other extras to the mix. With a comparable 2GB of RAM and without any extras, this machine would cost $1300 less than the current price of our Dell dual Xeon 3.6GHz PC that we used for comparison. As configured, for forty bucks less you get speed that?s statistically just about the same as a PC, Bluetooth connectivity, FireWire 800 on the motherboard, and then there?s that striking industrial design and cachet that only goes with owning a Mac. To be fair, again, the Dell machine to which we?re comparing this Mac was tested here at the Midwest Test Facility eight months ago, and Dell promises us a much more advanced test machine any day now. We?ll also be testing a dual processor, dual-core Opteron machine in the next few days, too. But until I?ve tested those newest dual-core Xeon and Opteron processors, I?d say that even though the Mac is still slower than the fastest PC in our benchmarks, for professional content creation it would be hard for me to pass it up. Highly recommended. 9.5 of 10 stars.
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