2GHZ Intel iMac vs Dual 1GHZ PowerMac MDD

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dixonbm

Registered
Today I visited a friend who recently aquired a brand new Intel iMac. I went over to show him a few things, he being a mac neophyte. I was shocked at how slow the Mac OS responded to application switching, loading applications that were in the background when clicked on in the dock in comparison to my Dual 1GHZ PowerMac MDD. Both have 1GB of memory. The only other thing I can think of is hard drive speed 5400 vs 7200.

Thoughts? Input?

I'm sure the Intel iMac is still faster at encoding imovie, converting MP3's etc, but come on, I'm talking about a lack of responsiveness within the Mac OS itself.

Has anyone had similar experieinces?
 
According to OWC's benchmarks, your is still faster on certain things. A lot of that depends on the program being used and wether or not emulation is used, but that shouldn't be the case for app switching and such inside the OS itself. Sounds like optimization problems or out of date software on your friend's computer.
 
OS Speed was the last thing that was a problem when I was messing around with an intel iMac at Fry's not long ago. I wasnt even aware of it until my friend looked up the "About this Mac" and found it was an Intel model. Those things are nuts so I don't know whats wrong with your friends Mac.


Maybe Im just paranoid about things but whenever I get a new comp I always do a fresh reformat/reinstall right out of the box.
 
BTW, both of those machines come standard with 7200 RPM drives, unless you added your own, slower drive. In addition, the iMac is using SATA vs. the MDD's IDE bus.

If you wanna be a "good" friend, wipe his system clean and reload it from the Restore CDs/DVDs before he puts a bunch of stuff on there... sometimes, the stock systems that come pre-installed on new Macs are a little wonky... they should work just fine out-of-the-box, but sometimes they don't.
 
I've got an Intel iMac and two dual 1 GHZ G4s. The iMac is easily faster than the dual G4s at just about everything. In fact the iMac feels about as fast as my dual G5 2.7, but to be fair I haven't done anything too demanding on the iMac and I don't have the UBs of Final Cut Suite yet.

But, the iMac should definitely be as fast or faster than the Dual 1 GHZ any day of the week. (Except for Rosetta stuff of course).

And in terms of pure OS responsiveness (Finder GUI, Spotlight, app switching) my iMac is in fact very slightly faster than my Dual G5.

I've got 2GIG RAM in the iMac FWIW.
 
mdnky said:
According to OWC's benchmarks, your is still faster on certain things. A lot of that depends on the program being used and wether or not emulation is used, but that shouldn't be the case for app switching and such inside the OS itself. Sounds like optimization problems or out of date software on your friend's computer.
Click to expand...

Please note that all of most/all of those benchmarks are running through rosetta...
 
i have a 1.83 imac intel and its faster than anything i've used before. i sold my 1.8ghz g5 2gb ram (first gen) to buy this (still had some money left over). i bought it refurb from apple and they accidentally shipped it with 1gb chip instead of 512, so i went ahead and maxxed it out with another 1gb chip. (read specs in sig). anything that runs UB is faster than any ppc running that app. OS responsiveness is amazingly fast, and is significantly faster now that my ram (although the same amount) is running at a faster speed (ddr2 667 up from ddr 400) and my graphics card's memory has doubled (radeon x1600 128mb up from geforce fx 5200 ultra 64mb).

the only thing that bothers me is running ppc apps thru rossetta..sometimes it can be painfully slow and annoying but eventually everything will be ported so i'm willing to wait.
 
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