iMac G5 / PowerMac G5 performance

H

HateEternal

Mac Metal Head
Has anyone seen any benchmarks between the PowerMac G5 and the iMac?

The iMac G5 is a killer price for a G5 and an apple flat screen. I wanna know what kind of performance you are losing.

I might actually think about getting a iMac for that kind of price.
 
The system bus is slower than it should be to allow maximum performance, which would take things down a notch.
 
You could maybe say that an 1.6 GHz PowerMac G5 would more or less equal an 1.8 GHz iMac G5 in performance. But that's not a choice you have right now. Basically, the PowerMacs are all dual processor machines, while the iMac's just got one of them. Plus, as mentioned, the bus speed and probably also a bit of graphics card difference. Depending on what one does, the machine will be more than enough, but for other uses, there just isn't an "enough". ;-)

Also: The killer price is killed two years later, when you want to upgrade to a G6 (or G5plus or whatever), because with the iMac you'll have to buy the screen _again_, whereas the separate Cinema Display will still be a good display for another new PowerMac...
 
fryke said:
but for other uses, there just isn't an "enough". ;-)
Click to expand...
Well said! I can't tell you how much of my time is spent waiting for Photoshop to finish tasks I give it. :)
 
I would assume that a maxed out iMac G5 wouldn't be nearly as fast as a low-end, stripped down PowerMac G5. They're in different categories: one in consumer, one in pro. It's really tough to compare two computers that differ across categories, since the hardware is radically different (bus speed, number of processors, etc.). Typically, anything in the pro category will be faster than anything in the consumer category, unless you get REAL extreme and compare low-end pro to high-end consumer -- then the line gets slightly blurred.

A more feasible comparison would be an iMac to an iBook, or a PowerMac to a PowerBook.
 
I realize the hardware differences... I was wondering if any one had seen ACTUAL stats on performance differences.
 
You _really_ think, ElDiablo, that a 1.2 GHz iBook G4 is 'nearer' to an 1.6 or 1.8 GHz iMac G5 than an old single processor PowerMac 1.6 or 1.8 GHz? The 'pro' and 'consumer' tags alone do _not_ make such a difference. If you have, say, an 'old' PowerBook G4 867 MHz (a Titanium), then a new iBook G4/1.2 GHz will beat it. Probably in _every_ test.

The question is, in my humble opinion, an interesting one, because now that the iMac's got a G5 processor, many professionals might consider the iMac a good alternative for some jobs...

I, for one, am quite interested in the benchmarks that will compare

- iMac G4 1.25 GHz
- PowerMac Dual G4 1.42 GHz
- iMac G5 1.8 GHz
- PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5 GHz
- PowerMac G5 Single 1.8 GHz

etc.

Where will the new iMac end up? Above the ex-pro G4/1.42 GHz machines? Would it even match (older) single processor G5 PowerMacs? We don't know yet. We can just make assumptions on how the bus speed, graphics card and harddrives will impact the benchmarks of the iMac G5, because the bus speed for all _other_ G5 machines has always been 1/2 processor speed...
 
fryke said:
You _really_ think, ElDiablo, that a 1.2 GHz iBook G4 is 'nearer' to an 1.6 or 1.8 GHz iMac G5 than an old single processor PowerMac 1.6 or 1.8 GHz? The 'pro' and 'consumer' tags alone do _not_ make such a difference. If you have, say, an 'old' PowerBook G4 867 MHz (a Titanium), then a new iBook G4/1.2 GHz will beat it. Probably in _every_ test.
Click to expand...

Oh, most definitely true, but it's absurd to compare a 3 year old pro machine to a currently-shipping consumer machine. Of course the comparison between pro and consumer must be done with models of the same era.

Pro and consumer alone don't make much difference, but I'm not backing off of my claim that typically, the pro machines will spank the consumer machines. You can't rely completely on "pro" and "consumer," but you can rest assured that the pro machines will cost more and be faster.

The iMac G5 looks promising, but is hobbled in comparison to the pro machines in terms of bus speed and graphics power.

I'd like to see some numbers on the new iMac G5 as well, but I don't think they'll be as great as we all want them to be.
 
The comparison between pro and consumer _does NOT have to be done_ with models of the same era. Because people first have to compare their _old_ hardware with current offerings. And the iMac G5 might appeal to professional users of older G4/G5 PowerMac hardware... That's why I think the question is still legit.
 
HateEternal said:
I realize the hardware differences... I was wondering if any one had seen ACTUAL stats on performance differences.
Click to expand...
I'd like to see that too. It'd be quite a sight to see an machine which is not shipping yet showing up on a benchmarking site. ;)

Bring on the 10 THz G6 optical processor benchmarks while you're at it! :p
 
This is the very same question I'm pondering myself and if anyone wants to lend some buying advice, I'll take it under consideration!

I'm currently trying to decide on a new study machine. This machine will be used primarily for Server and for studying for the ACSA, but probably not for daily usage or important work. My plan is to buy the next generation tower (hopefully 3GHz) with a large (23" or 30") when the display prices come down, the machines hit that magical 3GHz mark, and I hopefully have received a promotion to better afford all of that! This machine will run all my personal apps and have my personal data, to keep it safe from my work machine and data. I'd love to have my Final Cut Pro on there and hope to add Shake and Logic.

Now, for those apps, the obvious choice is the PowerMac, but my current need is for testing. I was pretty content with my 533MHz G4 tower, that I sold, but pricing between a refurb G5 and iMac G5 are pretty close, which makes it even harder to decide.

Its funny, to get back to performance and prove the point of the upgrade debate and comparing different generations. While I've owned iMacs and I like them, we all get so enthused by the duals and the PowerMacs that we lose sight in the fact that going from 533MHz PowerMac G4 with 133MHz bus to a 1.8GHz G5 iMac with 600MHz is just a ghastly gain in performance, let alone the fact that, in my case, I'd move from an Envision 15" LCD connected via RGB cable to an Apple branded, integrated, 20" display, with no extra cables or mess.
 
Ricky said:
I'd like to see that too. It'd be quite a sight to see an machine which is not shipping yet showing up on a benchmarking site. ;)

Bring on the 10 THz G6 optical processor benchmarks while you're at it! :p
Click to expand...

Graphics card benchmarks always come out waaaaaaaaay before the shipping date. I was just hoping someone knew of a place that got the same kind of in that sites like HardOCP and anandtech get in the PC world.

I really want to know if that 700 dollar price difference is worth it or not.

I know the iMac is the consumer machine and the PowerMac is pro, but i still want to see how they stack up.

Wouldnt you want to know if it was worth it to pay the extra 100 bucks on a non pro graphics card versus the pro? I know I do.
 
I guess we could go about it the long way...

Does anyone know where there are good benchmarks showing the overall system performance of the previous generation iMac G4's? Since Apple used those machines as their baseline for the iMac G5 performance evaluations, that would be a way to get an idea of where this new machine fits.
 
Ok, so, to start answering my own question.... ;)

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/desktops/0,39023846,39118219,00.htm

That is a comparison between iMac 1GHz/256MB, iMac 1.25GHz/256MB, and PowerMac Dual 2.0GHz G5/2GB (can we get these numbers much further apart!?).

(I'm no math guy, so if I'm off, sorry! You get what you pay for!)

In iMovie, the Dual 2 was about 39% faster than the 1.25GHz
In iTunes, the Dual 2 was about 225% faster than the 1.25GHz (WOW)
In Quake, the Dual 2 performed about 391% better in the frame rates than the 1.25GHz (ultra wow!)

**Note, they don't say what video card was used in the benchmarks for the dual 2.0GHz, but it does state that the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 64MB was used in the iMac 1.25, which is the same in the iMac G5, I believe**

Now, according to Apple's site, compared to the 1.25GHz iMac G4, the G5 is 189% faster in HALO, and 212% faster in Unreal Tournament 2004. If we want to apply those numbers to Quake's performance numbers on for the 1.25GHz iMac, which I know is not accurate as code is different and such, we could guess that, shockingly enough, that the iMac would put up roughly half, probably a little under half, the performance of the PowerMac, which makes sense being that it has 1 CPU instead of 2, a 600MHz bus instead of a 1GHz, and half the video memory. We should note that the Apple test machine was using 1GB of RAM and not the 256MB that zdnet did.

The Apple benches also state 46% increase in iMovie/Keynote, which might actually bring iMovie performance up to the PowerMac's numbers (in theory, according to what we can see here and not by using logic that two CPU's are stronger than one), a 71% increase in GarageBand, 56% increase in Photoshop and a 67% increase in FCE rendering.
 
The iMac thread provided us with a benchmark of the iMac G5, stating a 155.53 overall system performance.

For those of us with PowerBooks out there, I just ran Xbench on my two-month-old 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 with 1GB of RAM and 64MB video, so configurations should be "close".

The overall score of my PowerBook is 88.39, much lower than the iMac G5. CPU was just killer. My score was 87.85 compared to 170.42. Yes, we don't "work" in benchmarks all day long, but for the original poster, this should begin to give you an idea of the performance of the iMac.

Xbench.com has lots of benchmarks available to compare. If you'd like, I could also submit mine as well. We have some 1.25GHz Dual's at work, so on Tuesday, if everyone would like, I can run this utility on one of them, if you would like to be able to "ask the author" any in-depth configuration questions and not just see numbers. What other machines do we have represented here? I have access to a wide variety. I'd be interested to see teh score of the dual 1.8GHz machines we have. Yes, I know I could just read the site, but I like being able to actually compare the numbers to how the machine feels when I can use it...and I can't use all those other 1.8's listed on the site daily, if I please! :)
 
No offense, but your Xbench scores are way off. You need to make sure that your CPU is running at Highest performance. The scores you're reporting tell me that for your powerbook, you have either set the performance to 'Automatic' or 'Reduced'. Run it again with performance set to 'Highest'. On my PB 1.33 Ghz with those settings, I get a score of 160.67. Given that the iMac has a 500 Mhz advantage, this doesn't bode well for the G5 line of processors.

The overall score of my system is 122, which is about 30% less than the iMac. This is quite surprising, as notebooks tend to offer much slower performance than desktops. This can be attributed to different factors, namely
a) hard disk speed. Most laptops come with 4200 RPM drives. Most desktops come with 7200 RPM drives. This is nearly twice as fast in certain operations compared to notebook drives.
b) processors with more cache. Nuff said.
c) Different motherboard chipsets. Don't know if this is true in the Apple world, but in the PC world, laptop motherboard chipsets can't compare with desktop motherboards when it comes to memory bandwidth. The iMac G5 has a FSB of 600 Mhz (IIRC), while the Powerbook has a measly 166 MHz bus. The iMac should be mopping the floor with the Powerbook.

All in all, if that is the performance of the iMac, I'm not impressed.
 
System performance was at highest, believe it or not. But, now that I think about it, I haven't restarted this system in, well, I don't remember when! Probably a few weeks ago when I installed 10.3.5. I'm going to reboot it and run again in a few. They seemed low to me too!
 
Reboots rock! I double checked everything and ran a few utilities before running Xbench on a clean reboot and received an overall score of 115.27. Ran it again while typing this and received 115.98.

You said that your laptop, a 1.33GHz PBG4 scored 122, so I guess that makes sense, considering mine is a 1.25GHz.
 
Yeah, rebooting is a good habit. Sure, you don't need to, but doing it does help system performance.

So you can see, for a machine that boasts a 500 - 600 Mhz clock speed advantage coupled with a 333 Mhz FSB advantage, the performance of the G5 iMac isn't really much to write home about. That's my opinion and YMMV of course.
 
Although I would still like to see how performance is different, I think that I have decided that the Dual 1.8 is a way better deal, superdrive more upgradability, Radeon 9600XT for 50 bucks. Better deal in my opinion.

One question though, on apples store they say the 1.8 has 3 PCI slots, not PCI-X, but there is an option to add a 1GB PCI-X card in the customize page. Which is the mistake? Does it have PCI-X or does that card not go in there?

thanks to anyone who spent time looking for stuff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top