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PC Mag Compares G5 to Xeon

Posted by pudge on from the i-will-take-one-of-each dept.

zpok writes "PC Magazine did a comparison between a dual 2.0-GHz Power Mac G5 and an equally expensive Dell Precision 650 Workstation running dual 3.06-GHz Xeon processors. Their conclusion: 'we see that indeed the G5 is generally as fast as the best Intel-based workstations currently available.' But of course 'our cousin Ned can build you a better'un at half the dough.'"

2 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Hell, the G5 did better than PC Mag said it did by KH2002 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The G5 did better than PC Mag's quote "generally as fast as the best Intel-based workstations currently available." The G5 won 4 of 6 tests; and its wins were mostly by much bigger margins. For Photoshop, they also said that if you factored in the Xeon's much slower-loading controls, "both Macintosh computers would would have clearly outperformed the Windows-based computer." That would make it 5 out of 6, all but one by big margins, and the one loss was almost a tie. And PC Mag calls that "neck & neck"? The G5 completely dominated in video encoding- with software that's not even G5-optimized yet.

    Another insight was that one of the oft-criticized older Mac G4s beat the Xeon in one test (two if you factor in the controls issue), nearly tied it in another, and wasn't so far behind in two more. Heh.

  2. And not even with Panther... by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The G5 in these tests was running 10.2.7. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) will, by all accounts, increase performance even more. For example, from this Bare Feats test:

    "PANTHER PUNCH"
    Meanwhile, here's some data on the speed increase that OS X "Panther" (10.3) will provide G5 owners once it's released. 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%