Quake III Arena and Team Arena fucking rocks on a G5, as you'd expect it to - it's equal to or greater than most home PCs out there and far and away in excess of the system requirements.
We have regular all Mac LAN parties with Quake III at our workplace (so sue us - we're self employed commercial video makers with lots of free time!) and it's brilliant. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself since I've been using my 600Mhz 12" iBook vs my friends on their 15 and 17" powerbooks and a Dual 450 G4 - I now have the dual G5, quite a step up!
HSBC gave me either 50 or a 4 year student railcard (worth 70) as a sign up incentive for a student account and over the three years at uni I shuttled back and forth to London countless times, easily savin more than the 50 cash incentive.
They were very helpful when I lost my job during university and extended my free overdraft temporarily while I waited for my next loan installment from the Student Loans Company.
They have also been excellent post-university, keeping my interest free overdraft for a year and giving me an excellent rate on a car loan.
If you ever want to change banks, HSBC is a good place to go.
HSBC's online banking works flawlessly with both Safari and Camino on OS X, plus they give me rally good student deals on loans, overdrafts and cheap rail travel in the UK.
There's a lot to be said for keeping your customers happy. The trend that has emerged far to often with businesses lately has been "fuck the consumer, profits are king" and HSBC (at least when dealing with me) has been nothing but helpful at every turn.
iTunes on the Mac does work with other players besides the iPod. My friend has a Creative Nomad and it works perfectly with iTunes (although only at usb 1 speeds).
The firewire interface is very nice for rapid syncing of music and information. Obviously it's useful when you first dump your collection to the pod, but it makes life so much slicker when you add a new album to your library or the odd song here or there - updating to the iPod in seconds rather than minutes.
iTunes will no doubt work with usb 2.0 players if you have compatible hardware (a G5 for example).
And let's be sarcastic about a point I already made in my post. I said that the graphics cards were a wold apart and I mentioned that adding the best card available for the Mac would add $350 onto the price. There was no downgrade option on the Alienware - it was the Quadro or nothing.
Remember, the original poster said he could get this an Alienware Opteron box for less than a G5. If he's going to remove the expensive options to drop the price then fine, but the graphics card I chose for the comparison was the lowest model available in the build to order list.
I agree with your points, I just picked the Alienware machine in reply to the parent post who said they'd be able to get one cheaper than a G5.
I'm all for the right tools for the right jobs. The Mac just so happens to be the right tool for me, and the fact that this Dual G5 is smoking hot in the performance stakes is a big bonus, it's replacing a perfectly adequate Dual 450 G4.
I have a PC that I use for gaming, although it's getting a bit dated now (Athlon 500 with a GeForce 2) but I only really place Quake III Arena and Q3: Team Arena anyway, which are well within the machine's capabilities, I don't need a 9800 Pro for Quake III.
The reason that OS X works so well (well, one of the reasons) is that the hardware is fairly standard across the line - ie, one iBook is the same as another in hardware terms.
You can upgrade most of the important parts in a tower Mac - hard drive, memory, graphics card etc. You can even upgrade the processor(s) on most tower macs (except the G5) with third party cpus - even the Cube (although it's expensive to do that paricular mod).
If Apple made an X86 port of OS X they'd die - they're a hardware company, and you'd lose what makes the Mac great. Competing directly with Windows isn't going to get them anywhere - MS has deep enough pockets and shady enough business practices to keep its monopoly for the time being (chip, chip, chip away though).
Building a mac from scratch would also lose some of the fluidity of OS X. Knowing that a powermac is going to have such and such a graphics card or a certain modem/ethernet chipset/other piece of hardware is why you don't have to faff about with drivers and incompatibility.
I looked at the AMD Opteron Alienware box for digital video editing and set all the settings as close as I could to a mid range G5 (the AMD doesn't come in dual cpu config, so I selected the 1.8Ghz AMD and compared it to the 1.8Ghz Apple):
Apple Box: 18.Ghz G5 1Gb DDR ram 160Gb S-ATA drive Superdrive (DVD-RW. CD-RW, CDR etc) GeForce FX 5200 64Mb Gigbait ethernet 3x Firewire (1x 800, 2x 400) USB 2.0 SP-DIF optical inputs and outputs
Alienware box: AMD Opteron 64bit 1.8Ghz 1Gb DDR ram 160Gb S-ATA drive DVD, CD-RW combo (note, no DVD burning capability) Nvidia Quadro FX 128Mb Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Prices: Apple 1.8Ghz: $2,649 AMD Opteron 1.8Ghz: $3,101
This was as close as I could get the specs without digging around too much and I think it's pretty fair. I could add the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to try and get closer to the Quadro in the AMD box to add an extra $350 to the price - still comes in slightly less than the AMD.
I'm very much looking forward to Discreet's Cleaner 6 being installed on our new dual G5 (typing on it right now). We're currently using Cleaner 5 on a Dual 450 G4 - I think that just maybe the Dual 2.0Ghz will encode into mpeg2 for DVD a little quicker.
Similarly, Final Cut Pro will benefit from decreased render times, although it's pretty impressive on a dual 450 - Apple worked hard to sqeeze performance out of older systems with FCP.
You can shunt all this processing to dedicated video hardware costing thousands and upward, or you can buy a standard Mac and put FCP, Shake and Cleaner on there for much less.
Quake III Arena, while dated slightly compared to the better visual quality games still rules the roost for gameplay and it ambles along happily on this machine as you'd expect (more a function of graphics card really).
The first benchmarks released comparing the G5 to an Intel box had notes on this.
The PC folks wailed and moaned because Hyperthreading was turned off on the Intel boxes when the benchmarks were performed but they neglected the footnote that mentioned that the PC actually performed worse on the benchmarks when HT was on, so to be fair they took the best score.
Installing an AirPort card in a TiBook is a simple case of a couple of screws (albeit torx ones - so you need to find your torx driver) and a quick push and click job.
User installable parts on Apple laptops (keyboard, RAM, AirPort etc) are a doddle to fit - they were designed that way.
And I agree with you - my original point was that the G5 had been designed as a spacious, airy box for optimum airflow over huge oblong heatsinks.
Even with a power reduction in the G5, designing a powerbook with that sort of airflow is going to be difficult given the components you have to fit into the case.
And the G5 chassis is basically a giant wind tunnel with carefully aligned vanes and aerofoils. There's no easy way to fit that sort of design into a chassis less than an inch deep (even if it is over 17" wide).
We use it with DVD Studio Pro 1.5, Final Cut Pro (3, now 4), Photoshop and Cleaner 5, all on top of OS X 10.2.6
We don't use After Effects, and I could see why you'd be hurting for horsepower in Photoshop and After Effects.
The only reason we're updating to dual G5 is to speed up encoding to mpeg2 in Cleaner.
System:
Dual 450 G4 'Mystic' 896Mb RAM (3x 128, 1x 512) 2x internal HD - 30Gb, 60Gb 3x firewire HD - 2x 120Gb, 160Gb Original graphics card (I forget what it is - rage 128 or something with an ADC) Graphics card scavenged from a 9600/300, now running headless (the other rage 128 died on us and we just forked out for the G5) 2x 17" CRT @ 1024x768
The only weak links in the chain are the graphics cards really, although we haven't really had a problem. The IXMicro card taken from the 9600 can't display FCP's monitor window, but it is just fine with the timeline, media bins, tool palletes etc.
We have a dual 450 G4 and it's running Final Cut Pro in a production envirnoment. It has no special hardware additions (bar extra firewire drives) and it's producing videos all day every day.
It doesn't feel at all outdated - we've just put FCP4 on there, and given it a new lease of life.
We are replacing it with a Dual G5, but until they ship, the dual 450 is wonderful.
They run at very low speeds and are all monitored by the computer.
The old g4 towers used one large sideways mounted fan to blow air over the passive heatsink of the CPU(s) and other components, and the system would even run when the side was open (the motherboard was attached to the side that opened so that it was flat on your desk to facilitate easy upgrades).
The G5's 'zones' are well thought out. Only the dual G5 has 9 fans. The single processor 1.6 and 1.8Ghz only have 7 fans.
Each processor's heat sink is located in the centre of a "wind tunnel" (which is formed by two bulkheads, the motherboard and the clear perspex panel). The frontmost bulkhead has a low speed fan and the heatsink with its 40 metal fins, which are aligned parallel with the airflow, is set back about 10cm (5") from this fan. A further 4 or 5" behind the heatsink is another fan that is rarely switched on. The combination of these two fans and the design of the "wind tunnel" keep each cpu cool enough without having to run the fans at high speed.
I've examined the inside of a 1.6Ghz G5 quite closely (I have a friend at my local Apple store) and I'm impressed by the design - it was obviously very carefully thought out and was only possible because they could design every thing to fit - when you design the motherboard and the case you can ensure that you get the best fit.
The computer is always monitoring and will spin up the rear fan to a low speed when the cpu is working hard to create lower pressure behind the heatsink which promotes airflow over it from the front without having to speed up the front fan. We worked it quite hard and I never saw the front cpu fan spin up any faster or make any more noise than a quiet "swoosh" the whole time, and we were running it with the metal panel removed (but the perspex cover still in place).
An interesting note though - if you remove that perspex cover while the computer is on it automatically spins the cpu fans up to full speed to ensure the cpu doesn't overheat because the wind tunnel has had a side removed, thus reducing the airflow over the heat sink. We called it a "headless chicken panic" since the noise from the fans is very noticable compared to normal running when you almost can't hear them at all and we likened it to the computer getting all confused with its side removed and running round the yard in a daze.
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Well, if you want colour spelled without an o, you can use the extra one you have to go on the end of that "to".
too much, too far, too busy
to spell, to see, to go
two cows, two countable objects
Quake III Arena and Team Arena fucking rocks on a G5, as you'd expect it to - it's equal to or greater than most home PCs out there and far and away in excess of the system requirements.
We have regular all Mac LAN parties with Quake III at our workplace (so sue us - we're self employed commercial video makers with lots of free time!) and it's brilliant. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself since I've been using my 600Mhz 12" iBook vs my friends on their 15 and 17" powerbooks and a Dual 450 G4 - I now have the dual G5, quite a step up!
I guess it depends on individual circumstances.
HSBC gave me either 50 or a 4 year student railcard (worth 70) as a sign up incentive for a student account and over the three years at uni I shuttled back and forth to London countless times, easily savin more than the 50 cash incentive.
They were very helpful when I lost my job during university and extended my free overdraft temporarily while I waited for my next loan installment from the Student Loans Company.
They have also been excellent post-university, keeping my interest free overdraft for a year and giving me an excellent rate on a car loan.
If you ever want to change banks, HSBC is a good place to go.
HSBC's online banking works flawlessly with both Safari and Camino on OS X, plus they give me rally good student deals on loans, overdrafts and cheap rail travel in the UK.
There's a lot to be said for keeping your customers happy. The trend that has emerged far to often with businesses lately has been "fuck the consumer, profits are king" and HSBC (at least when dealing with me) has been nothing but helpful at every turn.
iTunes on the Mac does work with other players besides the iPod. My friend has a Creative Nomad and it works perfectly with iTunes (although only at usb 1 speeds).
The firewire interface is very nice for rapid syncing of music and information. Obviously it's useful when you first dump your collection to the pod, but it makes life so much slicker when you add a new album to your library or the odd song here or there - updating to the iPod in seconds rather than minutes.
iTunes will no doubt work with usb 2.0 players if you have compatible hardware (a G5 for example).
Wait for a little bit and you'll be able to use iTunes on Windows.
It's the greatest music organisation and playing software out there.
And let's be sarcastic about a point I already made in my post. I said that the graphics cards were a wold apart and I mentioned that adding the best card available for the Mac would add $350 onto the price. There was no downgrade option on the Alienware - it was the Quadro or nothing.
Remember, the original poster said he could get this an Alienware Opteron box for less than a G5. If he's going to remove the expensive options to drop the price then fine, but the graphics card I chose for the comparison was the lowest model available in the build to order list.
I agree with your points, I just picked the Alienware machine in reply to the parent post who said they'd be able to get one cheaper than a G5.
I'm all for the right tools for the right jobs. The Mac just so happens to be the right tool for me, and the fact that this Dual G5 is smoking hot in the performance stakes is a big bonus, it's replacing a perfectly adequate Dual 450 G4.
I have a PC that I use for gaming, although it's getting a bit dated now (Athlon 500 with a GeForce 2) but I only really place Quake III Arena and Q3: Team Arena anyway, which are well within the machine's capabilities, I don't need a 9800 Pro for Quake III.
The reason that OS X works so well (well, one of the reasons) is that the hardware is fairly standard across the line - ie, one iBook is the same as another in hardware terms.
You can upgrade most of the important parts in a tower Mac - hard drive, memory, graphics card etc. You can even upgrade the processor(s) on most tower macs (except the G5) with third party cpus - even the Cube (although it's expensive to do that paricular mod).
If Apple made an X86 port of OS X they'd die - they're a hardware company, and you'd lose what makes the Mac great. Competing directly with Windows isn't going to get them anywhere - MS has deep enough pockets and shady enough business practices to keep its monopoly for the time being (chip, chip, chip away though).
Building a mac from scratch would also lose some of the fluidity of OS X. Knowing that a powermac is going to have such and such a graphics card or a certain modem/ethernet chipset/other piece of hardware is why you don't have to faff about with drivers and incompatibility.
...and fairly tested it against a G5, a cpu that didn't use the standard optimisations either...
benchmarking is like comapring two women - some areas are better than others in each instance.
I looked at the AMD Opteron Alienware box for digital video editing and set all the settings as close as I could to a mid range G5 (the AMD doesn't come in dual cpu config, so I selected the 1.8Ghz AMD and compared it to the 1.8Ghz Apple):
Apple Box:
18.Ghz G5
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
Superdrive (DVD-RW. CD-RW, CDR etc)
GeForce FX 5200 64Mb
Gigbait ethernet
3x Firewire (1x 800, 2x 400)
USB 2.0
SP-DIF optical inputs and outputs
Alienware box:
AMD Opteron 64bit 1.8Ghz
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
DVD, CD-RW combo (note, no DVD burning capability)
Nvidia Quadro FX 128Mb
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Prices:
Apple 1.8Ghz: $2,649
AMD Opteron 1.8Ghz: $3,101
This was as close as I could get the specs without digging around too much and I think it's pretty fair. I could add the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to try and get closer to the Quadro in the AMD box to add an extra $350 to the price - still comes in slightly less than the AMD.
Well, of course.
If you're comparing Apple to a standard "build from cheapest parts by yourslef" PC then of course it's going to be more expensive.
Home brewed beer is cheaper than a pint in the pub.
I'm very much looking forward to Discreet's Cleaner 6 being installed on our new dual G5 (typing on it right now). We're currently using Cleaner 5 on a Dual 450 G4 - I think that just maybe the Dual 2.0Ghz will encode into mpeg2 for DVD a little quicker.
Similarly, Final Cut Pro will benefit from decreased render times, although it's pretty impressive on a dual 450 - Apple worked hard to sqeeze performance out of older systems with FCP.
You can shunt all this processing to dedicated video hardware costing thousands and upward, or you can buy a standard Mac and put FCP, Shake and Cleaner on there for much less.
Quake III Arena, while dated slightly compared to the better visual quality games still rules the roost for gameplay and it ambles along happily on this machine as you'd expect (more a function of graphics card really).
The first benchmarks released comparing the G5 to an Intel box had notes on this.
The PC folks wailed and moaned because Hyperthreading was turned off on the Intel boxes when the benchmarks were performed but they neglected the footnote that mentioned that the PC actually performed worse on the benchmarks when HT was on, so to be fair they took the best score.
It's a small world!
/. Em. heh.
Where would your geek status be if you didn't read
No, it was copying a 17Mb file from one folder to another on the same drive in 20 minutes - none of this slow-ass networking stuff!
You've been duped mate. This is a troll.
Installing an
AirPort card in a TiBook is a simple case of a couple of screws (albeit torx ones - so you need to find your torx driver) and a quick push and click job.
User installable parts on Apple laptops (keyboard, RAM, AirPort etc) are a doddle to fit - they were designed that way.
He does in fact, have it striped in OS X.
He had a screenshot of the Finder's 'get info' window for the drive. He named it, aptly enough, "BigHonkingDrive".
And I agree with you - my original point was that the G5 had been designed as a spacious, airy box for optimum airflow over huge oblong heatsinks.
Even with a power reduction in the G5, designing a powerbook with that sort of airflow is going to be difficult given the components you have to fit into the case.
And the G5 chassis is basically a giant wind tunnel with carefully aligned vanes and aerofoils. There's no easy way to fit that sort of design into a chassis less than an inch deep (even if it is over 17" wide).
We use it with DVD Studio Pro 1.5, Final Cut Pro (3, now 4), Photoshop and Cleaner 5, all on top of OS X 10.2.6
We don't use After Effects, and I could see why you'd be hurting for horsepower in Photoshop and After Effects.
The only reason we're updating to dual G5 is to speed up encoding to mpeg2 in Cleaner.
System:
Dual 450 G4 'Mystic'
896Mb RAM (3x 128, 1x 512)
2x internal HD - 30Gb, 60Gb
3x firewire HD - 2x 120Gb, 160Gb
Original graphics card (I forget what it is - rage 128 or something with an ADC)
Graphics card scavenged from a 9600/300, now running headless (the other rage 128 died on us and we just forked out for the G5)
2x 17" CRT @ 1024x768
The only weak links in the chain are the graphics cards really, although we haven't really had a problem. The IXMicro card taken from the 9600 can't display FCP's monitor window, but it is just fine with the timeline, media bins, tool palletes etc.
We have a dual 450 G4 and it's running Final Cut Pro in a production envirnoment. It has no special hardware additions (bar extra firewire drives) and it's producing videos all day every day.
It doesn't feel at all outdated - we've just put FCP4 on there, and given it a new lease of life.
We are replacing it with a Dual G5, but until they ship, the dual 450 is wonderful.
I'll say it has unfamiliarity - it's a troll.
Yep, I bought my 15Gb iPod at Best Buy in Coralville, Iowa while I was visiting my girlfriend.
They run at very low speeds and are all monitored by the computer.
The old g4 towers used one large sideways mounted fan to blow air over the passive heatsink of the CPU(s) and other components, and the system would even run when the side was open (the motherboard was attached to the side that opened so that it was flat on your desk to facilitate easy upgrades).
The G5's 'zones' are well thought out. Only the dual G5 has 9 fans. The single processor 1.6 and 1.8Ghz only have 7 fans.
Each processor's heat sink is located in the centre of a "wind tunnel" (which is formed by two bulkheads, the motherboard and the clear perspex panel). The frontmost bulkhead has a low speed fan and the heatsink with its 40 metal fins, which are aligned parallel with the airflow, is set back about 10cm (5") from this fan. A further 4 or 5" behind the heatsink is another fan that is rarely switched on. The combination of these two fans and the design of the "wind tunnel" keep each cpu cool enough without having to run the fans at high speed.
I've examined the inside of a 1.6Ghz G5 quite closely (I have a friend at my local Apple store) and I'm impressed by the design - it was obviously very carefully thought out and was only possible because they could design every thing to fit - when you design the motherboard and the case you can ensure that you get the best fit.
The computer is always monitoring and will spin up the rear fan to a low speed when the cpu is working hard to create lower pressure behind the heatsink which promotes airflow over it from the front without having to speed up the front fan. We worked it quite hard and I never saw the front cpu fan spin up any faster or make any more noise than a quiet "swoosh" the whole time, and we were running it with the metal panel removed (but the perspex cover still in place).
An interesting note though - if you remove that perspex cover while the computer is on it automatically spins the cpu fans up to full speed to ensure the cpu doesn't overheat because the wind tunnel has had a side removed, thus reducing the airflow over the heat sink. We called it a "headless chicken panic" since the noise from the fans is very noticable compared to normal running when you almost can't hear them at all and we likened it to the computer getting all confused with its side removed and running round the yard in a daze.