[G4] New system...

[David R. Boag]

Lucky for you, Macworld has just done speed comparison tests of G5's 
vs. G4's vs. Pentium 4's vs. Athlon's vs. Opterons in their latest 
issue in cahoots with PC World mag. They did tests in Photoshop, Word, 
Quake, Premiere, iTunes/MusicMatch Jukebox, and Pinnacle Pro & Studio 
8/Apple Compressor for MPEG-2 encoding.

To summarize, surprisingly the G5 dual 2GHz only won the MPEG-2 
encoding test. I was AMAZED at how badly the dual G5 got beaten in the 
encode CD to MP3 test--50% better with the new 64-bit Athlons (meaning 
that the G5's were over 100% WORSE). Granted, those systems are $400 
more expensive, but if you're into music, doubling rip time is 
significant for that money. Of course, Macs got killed in Word, too. No 
surprise...except that it wasn't even CLOSE! AGAIN more than double the 
time. IMHO, Apple's got to work on the MP3 encoding times if they are 
going to continue to seriously market Macs as music industry leaders.

Anyway, as far as your question, for what you want to use it for 
primarily, the tests showed that having dual processors was far more 
important than the G5/G4 gradient--IOW dual 1.4 GHz G4's beat single 
1.8 GHz G5's in both MPEG-2 encoding and Quicktime conversion in 
Premiere. They noted that Premiere is lousy for Mac (and the test 
proved that), but since FCP is Mac-only, they used the dual platform 
Premiere and got predictably poor results Mac vs. PC. But the dual G4's 
beat the single G5's in every test except Photoshop and Quake. Since 
FCP is geared toward dual-processor systems, I would think that results 
would be similar in FCP. BTW, the MPEG test also wasn't even close--the 
best PC was nearly twice as long timewise as the dual G5, and was 
nearly 50% longer than the single G5.

You should definitely check out the article. December, 2003 issue. 
IMHO, it's a wake-up call, or at least a reality check. I thought the 
article was fairly written--NOT completely apples-to-apples to be sure, 
and admittedly so by the author(s). They explained some of the large 
difference in the Premiere test, especially. But they were also quite 
shocked at the MP3 results. No excuses there.

HTH.
--
David R. Boag, DDS
spikedds at bellsouth.net
Dental Design of Kedron, LLC
http://kedrondental.com

On Nov 7, 2003, at 8:20 PM, Power Macintosh G4 List wrote:

> (personally i am definitely leaning
> towards the dual G5) but if that price wont fly, would a dual G4 out
> perform the single G5's in a price/performance arena??  it will all be
> used for editing both DV and MPEG2 content, and output to both DVD and
> web/presentation.
>
>
> thanks for the help
>
> sandor