How fast is the G5 Quad?

• Article 7 of 89
• MacFormat, January 2006

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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.

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.

Of course the time for the Quad to go soon came and while it was tempting to follow the philosophy “you can have my Quad when you prise it from my cold, dead hands”, I eventually conceded that Apple, with its billions in the bank, couldn’t possibly let me keep one of their computers. With it gone, I began to wonder if perhaps it was time for an upgrade. But with Intel Macs around the corner, was there much point and could I get something even faster – heaven forefend – in the PC world?

If I were a power user, then I’d be selecting my options in the Apple Store right now. Power Mactels won’t arrive until the end of 2006. Even once they do, it should be a good year or so before Intel-native power applications are available, given both Quark’s and Adobe’s tracks records and the fact that Adobe will be busily gobbling up Macromedia for most of the year. Until then, nothing Apple produces will be so powerful that it stands a chance of wiping the floor with the Quad. So that’s two years with a Quad or sticking with what I have now – I know which one I’d go for.

As for moving over to the dark side, I could, but amazingly my trip over the Styx would cost me twice as much as a Quad. Without the drain of Aqua, Windows and Linux nip along for most tasks, even on slower machines. But for pure processor work, you’re going to need your own electricity generator and to be cracking open the nitrogen canisters, ear protectors and oxygen masks before you’ll be able to cope with an ultra powerful, wallet siphoning, custom-built PC behemoth that could match the Quad.

I’m not a power user and my needs are small. As wonderful as my brush with Quad-dom has been, I can’t really afford a Quad of my own. But if you can and you need one, get it.

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