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G5 vs Opteron, Finally
metfoo writes "It's been months since the G5 and Opterons have been available for purchase. When the G5 systems were first released, many Mac bashers and AMD nuts discredited the G5's performance. They always ended their comments with 'Wait until its compared to an Opteron, then we'll talk.' Well, it's finally time to talk. Barefeats has posted an article comparing the two systems. The G5 line was compared to a Dual 2GHz Opteron and the results are impressive. In gaming, the Opteron system proved to be superior, which is partly due to the superior 9800XT over the base Radeon 9800. The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests."
Those two processors are not compared. The video graphics cards, the motherboard speed, and other things are compared. It should be labeled how Apple G5 Platform compares to Athlon Based Platform.
The thing that's true now is that the Mac systems are competitive. They're close to the fastest Intel/Athlon systems -- close enough that there's not an OBVIOUS performance reason to choose one or another.
They're close in price, too (if you go PC white box then the PC is still less than half the price, but for a Xeon system or something from Dell it's fairly close).
I don't think this benchmark is going to make up ANYBODY's mind one way or another, though -- it's an emotional debate rather than a logical one.
The good thing is the Mac's numbers are no longer embarrasingly crappy, as they were in the latter G4 days.
The 'huge' price difference isn't really the main issue. The issue is being boxed into a single-vendor solution. I can buy x86 machines from hundreds of sources. I can mix-and-match components rather freely.
Or I can hope Jobs hasn't discontinued the model of Mac that I had started to like. Apple proved they're not ready to be anything but a niche vendor when they got cold feet and killed their second source vendors (the Mac clone business)
This is only partially true; CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games) are generally far superior on the computer (Morrowind: need I say more?), as well as FPS (First person shooters) (Alien Vs Predator 2, Return to castle wolfenstien: Enemy Teritory), Adventure games (I can't think of a current one; monkey island?) and RTS (Real Time Stratagy)(Red Alert 2, warcraft 3, Kohan)- and there's a simple reason, the keyboard/mouse/very high def monitor are all but required to play these games and the ability to mod/upgrade these games is easily at least 1/2 the fun.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post