Athlon 64 or G5

[MJCfromCT]

Hi All,

Here's what i'm interested in...

Out of these two processors, which is the more powerful? I dont want to know which is better, pc or mac, i just want to know which system has more raw computing power. I've been doing a bit of research on google and can only find articles benching the g5 from about a year ago...dual g5 systems against p4 and dual xeon systems...the majority of the other things just seem to be forum posts or people's opinions...any info on real evidence pointing to which is the more power processor? Thanks in advance.

[Someone Stupid]

If your going dual, I'd go dual Opteron personally. The G5 benches had been found to be rather misleading and IIRC they haven't had any real speed boost while AMD's workstation/server offerings have. A dual Xeon system would be good for some things, just sharing that bandwidth hurts tremendously with netburst which is one of the reasons the Opteron fairs so well.

As for websites, I haven't heard about the G5 since the press releases got machine gunned in people pointing out discrepancies. The UK imposed some false advertising bit on them - either first 64 bit platform, or fastest - it was disproven so they had to remove it. Someone from England could probably clarify this point a whole lot better as it's been awhile since Mac was nailed with the G5.

Is MDLarson around, you could PM him and ask if he can provide you some maccentric sites which may or may not help you out depending on objectivity.

[genesound]

Of course with the Opteron, you also have the option of going quad depending on your budget and application.

[Someone Stupid]

What are you going to be running on it? Unless it is video and audio encoding (or folding) you'll probably do better with the Opteron.

[MJCfromCT]

Well I wont be running either...I was just looking for the information for personal interest...I have a mac friend who keeps boasting about his dual g5 which he will be getting soon, and how it is so much faster than more powerful than the athlon 64, or anything that the PC market has for that matter, etc. etc, i was looking for some cold hard facts to shut him up.

[genesound]

I think it'll be a while before mac can touch a quad opteron

[Someone Stupid]

Let him enjoy his 1 grand performance for 3 grand. Don't be a spoiler.

[cuelebre]

smoke

We are taking Big Money here.....but How much???

[MJCfromCT]

Originally posted by Someone Stupid
Let him enjoy his 1 grand performance for 3 grand. Don't be a spoiler.

I'll sit here comfortably knowing that I can play games and he can't

On another topic though, have you all seen the new apple monitor, the 30" one?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL....3.1.1.0?27,10

...and look at what is needed just to run it...


NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...zxyv/2.7.0.6.3

[Someone Stupid]

Nice prices

The links were timed out MJC, though nothing the search field couldn't dig up.

[MJCfromCT]

Sorry about that SS..

If you go to http://store.apple.com and click on their link for "Displays from $1299", it'll bring up their monitor page...from there you can see the price of the 30" cinema display, and if you click on it, you'll find that it requires the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL Card to run it.

[zybch]

Ah Macintosh.

Because when you build something an idiot can use,
only idiots will use them!

A quad opteron with dual core CPUs (8 chip basically) will knock literally anything else out of the water, at least at the price point.

[genesound]

Hmmm... I know of lotsa pretty high powered sound mixers that use macs that i would hardly call idiots

And as for "quad opteron with dual core CPUs (8 chip basically)" that's still vaporware.

Even the quad opteron I linked to is still as yet unreleased, but it is expected very soon, maybe within a week.

As far as the price point... a quad anything is gonna cost real money! i.e. more than the mac dualie... but if performance is really the primary consideration, who cares!

[scottluebke2003]

The G5, I'm sure, is very fast. But the Power MAC G5 $3000 system has only 512mb of RAM and an X600 PCI-e video card. That is trash. For $3000, you could the meanest PC machine. It would tear up a $3000 MAC. I like MAC's, I have an iBook, but Apple charges way too much for what they are giving you.

[Trash Can Man]

When you compare PC's to Macs you cant debate based souly on hardware. You have to look at what you are going to be doing with the machine and ask yourself, which one better suits my needs? Am I a high end gamer freak geek? Am I an artsey geek? Is this machine for entertainment; for multimedia work; for buisness work? It always boils down to the SOFTWARE that is going to be used on the machine, hardware is secondary. I personally do think that the mac g5 is overpriced for some of the features you get; particularly the video card. A $2000 machine should come standard with something better than a geforce 5200. However the apple notebooks are priced better than their pc counterparts in my opinon. I just got a 12 inch ibook for $900!