How fast is the G5 Quad?
- Article 7 of 89
- MacFormat, January 2006
Apple has been kind enough to lend us a new G5 Quad for a whole week. So, naturally, we're going to put the pedal to the metal with the fastest Mac ever made
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There are three things in life that are so fun everyone should do them at least once. Number one is to go to Vegas. Number two is to go skydiving. And number three is to use a fully loaded Power Mac G5 Quad.
From the moment you’ve heaved it out of its Goliath of a box, thrown away roughly 10% of the Earth’s natural resources cunningly disguised as packaging, recovered from your sprained back and then plugged it in – all the way through to the moment the bailiffs come to repossess it because you couldn’t afford it in the first place – the Power Mac G5 is simply the most fun computing experience you can have. Step aside iMac G5: your Front Row and iSight tricks are nothing to us. Move out the way PowerBooks: your widescreen displays and anti-jog functions are mere distractions. The Quad is here and my grin is now so wide, people think I’ve stuck a coat hanger in my mouth.
I’ve been stuck in G4 land for a long time with my sub-gigahertz iMac and PowerBook, their hard drives so tiny my iPod can back them both up and still have room for five albums and an episode of Lost. USB 2.0 is just a dream. Video encoding is a job I reserve for when I don’t actually need to use either of them for a week or so.
All that changed when the Quad arrived. I plugged it in, switched it on and realised that I now had a machine of raw, unbridled power at my disposal.
The Quad is a dual-core, dual processor machine, which means it effectively has four G5 chips inside it, all working together to crunch whatever numbers you throw at it. To make sure there are no bottlenecks, Apple has optimised the Quad’s architecture as much as possible. Each chip has a 1MB level 2 cache and buses that can carry data to and from each chip at half its speed. The old PCI and AGP cards of yore have been replaced with the new, vigorous PCI Express standard. And the Quad uses even faster memory than its predecessors, with the option of error-correcting chips if you want them.
Despite all this power, we’re talking a Ferrari, not a monster truck here. The Quad is also a thing of beauty. Its metallic grey exterior has a stark look, but everything you need is right where you need it without even a hint of cheap plastic to tarnish the aesthetic. On the back, there are ports aplenty: three USB 2.0, two gigabit Ethernet, a FireWire 400, a FireWire 800 and optical and analog audio in and out. On the front for easy access are a USB, a FireWire and a minijack port.
There are a few blemishes to this perfection: the 16x dual layer SuperDrive may have a beautiful exterior, but its flimsy cup holder interior is a definite let down. Equally, the internal speaker will make even a Mozart piano concerto sound like your local infants school’s Christmas Nativity play. And those start-up chimes. They are the wimpy chords of a Performa 630, surely, not those of The Rock of the Mac world. Note to Apple: more bass next time if you want to shock and awe everyone.
After that, the fun begins. The Quad is quiet at it starts, reminiscent of an electric train leaving the station rather than the Biggin Hill air show that is the average nitrogen-cooled super-PC. Staggeringly, it soon returns to an even quieter purr despite its electricity-hungry processors and the fans gently sucking the atmosphere out of the room through its front grille.
Once the Quad was powered up and I’d transferred over the contents of my old Mac using the standard OS X Migration Assistant, I felt the need to take it for a spin to see what it could do. You’ll feel this too. You’ll have no choice. It’s genetic.
At first, you’ll just notice that most things seem a lot easier. Application launches are faster, almost instantaneous in some cases, although the usual Adobe laggards will spin their wheels for a while. Response times in virtually all applications are equally improved, although Mail still has a touch of the sloth about it. But even those old reliable clock-hoggers, Word and Entourage, will be eaten up and spat out by the Quad’s four G5s. They launch in a couple of seconds and despite the occasional delay – wow, how badly written must they be? – they nip along as though you’re actually using Office for Windows.
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