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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Safari remains a thorny problem. It zipped along most of the time, limited only by my 1Mbps broadband connection – which shows you just how noticeable any delay becomes once you’re using a Quad. But I was still able to beachball it by opening up multiple tabs and windows. Clearly, Safari needs a tune up.
But after driving along the backstreets of Macdom for a while, it was time to pull out onto the motorway. Video can bring any computer to its knees given the right pressure points and it frequently incapacitates both my iMac and PowerBook. I was confident that playing a high-def video full screen while doing some hefty video encoding would expose the Quad as a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
Boy, was I surprised. Playing the video only took up less than a fifth of the Mac’s total CPU capacity. The simultaneous video encoding using ffmpegX, which isn’t even optimised for the G5 processor, took just 10 minutes; on my iMac or PowerBook, that would have been an hour and a half’s job at least. I had to scan the video all the way through to believe the Quad really had encoded the whole file and not just rendered half of it or left the soundtrack off. But it was true.
So I put it to work on the backlog of files that I had waiting on my external hard drive and which I’d been saving for that week off I mentioned. The quad encoded them all within two hours, while I happily carried on with work in Word, Safari, Entourage and a couple of other programs, all with a video running in an inset window. Even encoding four or five files at once, there was hardly any drop off in speed. I felt as though the laws of physics were being broken by the Mac before my eyes.
Producing videos for iPods was a similarly eye-opening experience. QuickTime, which should really be called TakingItsOwnSweetTime, was still trapped in the last ice age, but ffmpegX was quite able to churn out iPod-compatible videos in a quarter of an hour.
Audio encoding was equally fast. A quick rifling through my CD collections revealed nearly a dozen CDs I hadn’t bothered to encode with iTunes. The Quad pulled data off them as fast as the CD drive could provide it. All the CDs were encoded within an hour, with a top encoding speed of roughly 25x during some of the end tracks of each CD.
I finished my first day with the Quad on a small adrenaline high. The miraculous thing about the Quad is that you are now the limiting factor: barring exceptional cases, no longer are you waiting for the Mac to do things; the Mac is waiting for you to give it tasks.
But day two of life with a Quad began uneasily. This Quad was on load. How could I return to my glacial G4s after this? To wean myself off the Quad, I figured I could expose some vulnerabilities with more stringent tests. On virtually any Mac, Virtual PC is a resource-sucking, lumbering beast of a program. How well did it work? Impressively, unfortunately. I felt like I was actually using a PC. Sure, one from say two years ago that I really wouldn’t be tempted to play Halo on, but in full screen mode, I might as well have had a Windows XP box in front of me.
Next up, the ultimate consumer benchmark: Doom 3. This was the first time the Quad was really taxed. Problematically for games players, the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 is at best an above average graphics cards. If I were really into games, I’d need the next card up, the GeForce 7800. I could spend an extra £1,000 for the Quadro FX 4500, which has 512MB of VRAM and a jack for connecting stereo 3D goggles.
With the Quad aimed squarely at the professional market, it was time to deploy the professional applications: Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects. As you might expect, the Quad was able to do most ordinary things in an instant. Even using filters and effects didn’t tax it. It was only when dealing with A1 and A0 images in Photoshop or stupid numbers of high-def video files that the Quad began to hesitate: even then, it remained quiet as a whisper, unlike some of its predecessors. I was both in awe and aware that I was the weakest link. It was both freeing and disturbing, as though the Quad was playing with me. I wasn’t totally sure I welcomed my new four-processored overlord but I was glad of its power when it was working for me.
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