Benchmarks show Apple’s new iMac G5 is 35 percent faster than old iMac

“With everyone being so hungry for information about this latest incarnation of Apple

20 Comments

  1. Good. They did the test with 512 RAM. It should be. What worries me is that is someone wants to put out bad press they might be able to relatively easily by benchmarking with only 256 RAM which is the standard config.

  2. “Still, they weren�t as fast as the Power Mac models that come equipped with two G5 processors.”

    Well, duh. There are TWO processors vs ONE processor. I respect MacWorld, but that sort of assessment is really bad.

    A better comparison would have been the original single cpu G5 machines, even tho they’re no longer available.

  3. Hmmmm. I would expect more than a 35% speed increase, considering:

    Faster processor: 1.25GHz vs. 1.8GHz
    Faster Bus Speed: 167MHz vs. 600MHz

    Maybe its because nothing is optimized for the G5….

    Has anyone tested using a developer release of Tiger?

  4. I was surprised, too, TMAN. I seem to recall that the G5 was supposed to provide roughly a 40% performance boost at the *same* clock speed as the G4. In this case a 44% clock speed increase (plus bus, etc.) yielded a 35% performance increase. Some of it must be the lack of G5 optimization.

    The iMac G5 20″ still looks sweet with the nice screen, great form factor and painful but tolerable price. In comparison to one year ago (single processor PowerMac G5 plus a 20″ Apple Cinema Display) it is a steal. The only ting that bothers me for the longer term is the inability to upgrade the 5200. Is there any chance that a 3rd party can develop a replacement graphics card for the iMac G5?

  5. Ed makes this shockingly wacky claim: “Keep in mind that only Photoshop, Compressor, and MAYBE Cinema 4D are G5-aware.

    Yeah right. Those and Illustrator (and the rest of Creative Suite), Quake Arena, Bias Peak, After Effects, LightWorks, Vue 4, Pro Fortran Suite, Sketch Up, Studio Artist, Cinebench, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, Motion, LiveType, Soundtrack, Garage Band, Logic Platinum, Xcode, Shake, KeyNote, Shake, QuickTime, Finder, etc. etc. etc. If you google for “optimized for g5”, you’ll get 700 hits.

    Very few performance-critical Mac OS X applications are NOT optimized for G5.

    As a matter of fact, you could argue that all Mac apps that use Cocoa or Carbon APIs are optimized for G5.

  6. “Ed makes this shockingly wacky claim: ‘Keep in mind that only Photoshop, Compressor, and MAYBE Cinema 4D are G5-aware.'”

    I was referring to the apps that Macworld used for testing, not the entire G5-aware library.

    BTW: I got 36,300 hits for “optimized for G5”.

  7. “about 14,900” hits with a9. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

    John Egan:
    Good question re: the memory configuration. MacInTouch posted some Xbench results run with different mem configs but the biggest difference seemed due more to adjusting processor performance settings between Reduced, Automatic, and Highest.

    King Mel:
    IIUC, the iMac G5 GPU is an IC on the main logic board (i.e. not a card as many are calling it). Maybe Apple and/or third parties will eventually offer a logic board replacement that upgrades the CPU, GPU, FireWire, etc. Seems like an opportunity to retain the display without having a fully headless system. I’d might want to have that option in 2-3 years instead of purchasing a completely new system.

  8. Jack A:
    Some of the MacInTouch Xbench results I mentioned were actually higher overall with 256MB than with 768MB/1GB, but they didn’t break it down into individual tests.

    I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret Xbench results since they often seem inconsistently questionable.

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