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Comparative G5/G4 Tests

Posted by timothy on from the and-statistics dept.

rocketjam writes "Barefeats.com has posted test results comparing a 2GHz G5 MP, 1.8GHz G5, 1.6GHz G5 and G4 MP's at 1.4GHz, 1.25GHz and 1GHz. They use Photoshop, Cinebench 2003 and a Bryce 5 render for tests. Bottom line is the G5 2GHz MP has the best bang for your buck, but you might think twice about trading in that dual processor G4 for a solo G5...the G4s hold their own quite well. They also say tests in Panther yielded significant increases in the G5 scores."

12 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm. Not much of a review. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seems more like promotional material for Apple. Consider their analysis of performance improvement when discussing OX X 10.3:

    We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 "Jaguar"....
    ....CPU score increased 40%
    ....Thread score increased 44%
    ....Memory score increased 38%

    Hmm. I guess that Apple users aren't too discriminating when it comes to stats or methodological testing descriptions in a review! (Perhaps, though, with Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, we're just spoiled.) Surely, there must be better Mac-related reviews out there (and hopefully some that pit them against the latest Intel and AMD offerings, just to be interesting).

  2. Not hard to do by Hythlodaeus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not a very difficult feat to get more performance per dollar than the G4 - it was already abyssmal in that regard. When the G4 was introduced the prices made sense, but they just kept on charging the moon while G4 improved only marginally compared to the P4 improving by leaps and bounds.

    --
    For great justice.
    1. Re:Not hard to do by capmilk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nowadays a dual 1.25 GHz G4 starts at 1600 Eur in Europe. (That's roughly the same in US$.) A single G5 starts at 1800 Eur. Since I am about to replace my G4/400, there a couple of things I thought about:
      The G4 is cheaper.
      The G4 does multiprocessing for the price.
      The G4 is able to boot OS 9. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 is compatible with my low voltage PCI cards. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 is available today. The G5 isn't.
      The G4 ist a pleasure to look at. The G5 isn't.

      Why on earth should I choose a G5 over a dual G4?

    2. Re:Not hard to do by oggmonster · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Umm... I am writing this on a machine booted from a 180GB drive sitting in an external case. It is currently connected to my PowerBook with Firewire 400 but the case also supports Firewire 800 and USB 2. All the better to connect to my Dual G5 when it ships.

  3. bryce render test??? by tolldog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why didn't they use a real 3d package and do render tests in Maya.

    And I find it hard to believe that a 20 second render test will show much insight into a machines speed.

    Why not go with a more realistic scene render that would take a couple hours??

    --
    -I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
  4. Comparing Apples and... by gklinger · · Score: 2, Interesting
    That was brief. Not much information beyond what's mentioned here (serves me right for reading the actual article before posting). At any rate, I wonder why they didn't include a single CPU G4 as a baseline? Comparing dual and single CPU machines produces skewed results.

    It looks like the Dual G5 2GHz has the best bang for the buck.

    Yeah, it's a big bang but it's also a heck of a lot of bucks and I'm not yet convinced it's worth it. Of course, if (or more likely, when) Apple discontinues the G4-based Powermacs, we won't have a choice.

  5. non-optimised software by Ffakr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I mailed the barefeats guy but haven't heard back yet...

    The photoshop tests indicate version 7.0, while Adobe has posted some optimised libraries and plugins for 7.0.1 that supposedly speed up some functions considerably.

    I haven't heard back as to whether the author actually used 7.0.[0] or the slightly optimised 7.0.1.

    so far, I'm pretty happy with the reported G5 performance considering how different the architecture is to the G4.
    Apple's in a very odd position for a Computer Company right now. Instead of releasing increasingly bloated software that runs ever slower, requiring ever faster hardware... their hardware is getting faster and the software is speeding up. i'm running Panther now and it is noticeably faster at many tasks. :-) The same seems to be the case for the G5 in general... it's only going to get faster.

    --

    I'm not feeling witty so bite me

    1. Re:non-optimised software by val1s · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You are right about Apple being in an odd position at the moment, But it's only odd compaired to everyone else. They've been in this position for some time. The original PPC conversion from 68k was very similar. You had a very fast CPU in your box, but everything was getting emulated/interpreted on the fly and it was still faster than it was before, over the next 2 years things continued to improve. Again this happened with Dual proccessors, first nothing then photoshop, then some system level stuff in OS9. OS X was next, Dog slow, then 10.1 with quartz extreme, etc, etc... Apple is great at making they're initially slow computers faster, and feel new again. :) I'm sure there are some instances that i've missed here, something about the 68030 comes vaguely to mind, first chip with internal cache i think.. IDK i was 7 when that came out.. Now if they could only make this B&W g3 I'm working on feel like a g5 :)

    2. Re:non-optimised software by vitaboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, there's something screwy with the MP-aware Photoshop 7.0 test. It shows that the dual 2 GHz G5 is only 17% faster than the dual 1.42 G4. The dual G5 has a clockspeed advantage of 40% alone, not to mention an FSB that is 8x faster than the pokey 167 Mhz bus on the G4. There is no way in heck that the G5 can post scores that are only 17% faster than the G4. Maybe it was tested without using the optimized G5 plug-in, but the result is certainly very odd. I hope the barefeats guy gives some clarification about this (and if it was because the G5 was running Photoshop without the new plug-in, I wish he would stop posting scores until he actually can get some "real" G5 results!)

  6. Re:caveats about these tests by King+Babar · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.

    Price is $2,801.

    So the Mac is about $200 more than a system with about the same performance once the Mac is optimized.

    OK, so I am even less lazy, and I disbelieve. I did what you said you did, and my dual-Xeon Precision 650 with a USB mouse, USB keyboard, dual-monitor DVI capable video card 120 GB IDE drive (largest IDE drive there; Serial ATA is not an option and the SCSI drive prices gave me the giggles) and DVD-RW/CD-ROM 48X (hope it's writable) drive and no Dell support (to equal the Apple G5) would cost me a total of $3054.10.

    Now, I was too lazy to find out if the Dell had gigE ethernet like the Mac, but this is a closer comparison *IF* you are right about the fact that an optimized dual 2 GHz G5 is only equivalent to a 2.4 GHz dual Xeon. If it actually turns out to be anywhere close to a 3.0 GHz dual Xeon, we can stop having this conversation right now, since that box starts at over $4000. Myself, I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in between.

    So that makes the G5 about the same performance as a Dell that might run anwhere between $0 and $500 more. "Priced very attractively" is how I would have to put this. Likely not attractively enough to get *many* Windows shops to switch (based on hardware cost and software legacy alone anyway), but attractive enough to keep market share and probably then some.

    --

    Babar

  7. Re:What about Panther gains for the G4s? by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is true, and a Bad Thing, and I make no excuses for it at all.

    At the same time, it's either take the speed increases and live with the lower drive count, or don't take the speed increases. And remember, FireWire 800 should finally be fast enough for video editing, especially on a separate bus from the output device.

    I could get whatever case I wanted if I switched to the PC world, but then I would have to deal with tiresome Windows problems, and I wouldn't get to use Final Cut Pro, still the best video editing software there is.

    If that makes me a slave to Steve's fashion sense ... well, I have to admit Johnathan Ive and friends surely have a fine touch.

    D

  8. Re:What about Panther gains for the G4s? by johnpaul191 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    that would be interesting to know.

    a few rumor sites and mailing lists have reported (hrmmm) that in their personal unofficial tests they thought 10.3 beta was showing the biggest speed increases in CRT iMacs and the older G4 and G3 machines. granted they did not have G5s to test on, but they loaded their beta versions of 10.3 on everything from zippy G4 towers to laptops to CRT iMacs and said they felt the iMacs speed increase felt the greatest. i am curious to try it in my G4 tower (400mghz with a recently installed upgrade to 800mghz).

    i know 10.2 felt much faster than 10.1 and then upgrading my video card (from a rage128) to take advantage of Quartz Extreme seemed to help too. i am not a gamer, but i do some graphics work and i thought anything to help out my G4 400mghz. all the fun stuff in Aqua that i cursed can be used now and doesnt seem to matter (genie effect, bouncing dock etc).