“Lured by the siren song of speed, I wandered into a local Apple Store late last week, my interest piqued by the new dual 2.7-GHz Power Mac G5s that Apple Computer Inc. announced last Wednesday. Actually, wandered isn’t the right word, as I made a beeline for the store after work with the goal of bringing home one of those new dual 2.7s,” Ken Mingis writes for Computerworld. “A short time later, at a cost of $2,999 plus tax — the same price as the old dual 2.5-GHz models — I headed home to see how the latest and fastest Power Mac would handle. In a word: Awesome.”
Mingis wites that he “pulled the 250GB hard drive from the new machine, replacing it with two 74GB Western Digital ‘Raptor’ hard drives, which spin at 10,000 rpm. I have the two drives in a striped RAID configuration, which offers a speed boost at the cost of storage space.”
“I also ran a few tests to try and confirm the extra speed. As in the past, I ran the Xbench benchmarking application for a quick look at how those two liquid-cooled G5 chips perform. As background, the dual 2.5-GHz model with the stock 250GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM came in last fall with a score of 249. The dual 2-GHz model with the striped RAID configuration achieved a score of 230. And a first-generation dual 1.8-GHz G5 Power Mac that I had early last year, with a single 10,000-rpm drive in it, managed 208,” Mingis writes. “The new dual 2.7-GHz G5 Power Mac topped them all: The first time I ran Xbench, it scored 295. The second time I ran it, I got 298.”
“Also remember that the new Power Mac is running Tiger, while the other machines I’ve tested in the past were running Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther.” I’d like to believe that Tiger runs faster than Panther, as each iteration of the Mac OS X has added little speed bumps here and there. But I haven’t tested it to find out,” Mingis writes. “All I can say for sure is that the combination of this machine, with the extra RAM, twin 10,000-rpm hard drives and Tiger, makes for one barnburner of a Power Mac. It may not be the 3-GHz G5 rocket Jobs promised us, but it’s darn close.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple upgrades Power Mac G5 line with dual 2.7GHz 64-bit processors and Mac OS X Tiger – April 27, 2005
As not having ever used Cinebench, what is a 50 point differencial? Alot, a little, what? I would like to know how much difference the HD made? Is it faster with the 2 RAID-0? is 1 + the stock drive just as fast?
Not exactly on topic, but I didn’t get ANY work done today because of people showing up at my desk wanting to see demos of Tiger. At first I showed a handful of fellow IT guys some demos of downloading a 1000+ page PDF document and using Spotlight to find an obscure command on page 733 within a few seconds of it existing on the hardrive. After a full demo of the rest of the major features, they must have told more & more people as dozens showed up at my desk throughout the day, stating that “I heard this Tiger is something I HAVE to see..” I’ve never heard such positive reaction to an OS.
Been “spring cleaning” the ol’ hard drive all day. Takin’ forever, just…want…to…install….
Dear God,
I will worship you forever if you just send me a dual 2.7 G5 with 30″ display.
thanks,
twdldee
Dear Satan,
My soul will be forever yours if you get me a dual 2.7 GHz G5 with 30″ display. And since you’re Satan, also 8 GB RAM.
thanks,
twdldee
twdldee,
Your Dell is in the mail.
You’re Welcome,
Satan
Just look at how much slower Longhorn is than XP, and XP is than Windoze 98.
Anything, anything but a Dell! I’ll take a beige G3 over a Dell, a PowerBook 190, even a Classic II, but please, anything but a Dell!!
Anything, anything but a Dell! I’ll take a beige G3 over a Dell, a PowerBook 190, even a Classic II, but please, anything but a Dell!!
Hey, watch it! I have a beige G3, but I’ve upgraded it to a 6.5Gh super G4, 12GB of RAM and 1.2 terabytes of hard drive space. Let’s see you top that with your puny G5.
Buffy,
Mac OS X constantly caches to the hard drive, nothing kills it more than a big fat slow 7,200 RPM 250 GB drive filled to the rim, you want PowerMac speed, in UI and large fast file manipulation, Photoshop speed. Either use a 10,000 RPM 74 GB Raptor as a bare bones boot, application drive keeping it slim and using the stock drive as a file only drive; or RAID 0 a pair of a Raptor as a boot, 140 GB drive.
It really makes the PowerMac scream.
http://g5support.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=1946