The Mac Address

I wanted to guage reaction before posting my coments on the [url=http://www.apple.com/powermac/]new G5 systems[/url]. Here are my observations/comments.

At 2.5 GHz with a 1.25 GHz FSB (they didn’t water down the bus ratio…kept it fast at 2:1), these systems should be fast beyond anyone (except Elroy’s) needs.

[url=http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html]Liquid cooling[/url]…very nicely done. Some have commented that 2 independent loops would be better than 1 loop…however, convection works better as the delta T increases…so having both CPUs heat the same loop (making it go from cold at the bottom of the radiator…to piping hot at the end of CPU 2) greatly aids coolant flow (there is no real pump in this system…flow is determined by coolant temperature and temp drop across the radiator…as the fans go faster the delta between “cold” and “hot” will grow speeding coolant flow…that’s how “OSX controls the flow of fluid”).

Low end of 1.8 GHz times 2 = very good price/performance. Don’t even bitch to me about the lack of RAM slots and slow PCI slots…most of you will never touch a PCI-X card…much less a 64 bit PCI card (which the low end machine accomodates). Also…”only” 4 ram slots…it still accomodates 4.0 GB of ram. That’s more RAM than most 8 slot machine owners have installed.

Video cards…Let’s take a look at the users who need 2 G5 processors…3d modelers, photoshop maniacs, video guys, and research scientists. Now…to burst the bubble…None of these people engage the 3d pipelines of a GPU (except with Quart Extreme…which works as well on a 32 meg oiriginal radeon as on a 256 meg 9800 XT). The argument that higher end machines should have the highest power, noisiest video card is a ignorant one. Any 64 (or even 32 meg) vid card can push one or two 23″ cindema displays in 2d. All of the targeted power users spend all (being 100 percent) of their time in 2d (even 3d renders ignore the 3d pipleines of today’s graphics cards). It’s ALL cpu limited.

Same old enclosure. Yeah…it is. What were you expecting? I’d like more internal hard drive bays (I use all 4 of my QS HDD bays). 1 optical bay with a superdrive is just fine tho (I have a old 2x 104 drive in my QS…with no need for a second…it only takes a second to image a disc for duplication). With FW800 (and likely improved FW800 performance with the tweaked motherboard), external drives will be fast enough. Get a 4 drive external tower…and be happy about it…because you can haul your life to another machine in 2 seconds if the need to do so should ever arise.

Bottom line…you fanboys out there who are bitching about 2.5 GHz being too slow…tell me what you do that pushes the dual 1.8 base machine? Huh?…I’m waiting…what kind of power user are you? 4 gigs of ram clearly isn’t enough for you either right? You’re the frikkin man and only a quad Opteron will suit your needs!

-Tycho