Hi All,

The lease on my G5 PowerMac is ending in a couple of months. My quandry:

I currently have a G5 Dual 1.8 (June 2004) PowerMac with ADC 20" Cinema Display and Radeon 9600 XT (128 MB video Ram)

To be honest, apart from dome dabling in film editing, I use the current machine's grunt when playing World of Warcraft - which works ok, but I'd like it to be smoother.

I'm thinking of changing for a 24" iMac with the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB SDRAM upgrade.

Would you imagine this iMac will perform better than my current PowerMac?

Any thoughts?

Are you insane? Repace a real mac (tower) with an iMac form factor? Are you insane? Are you INSANE?

Why not just get:
- a third party video card with 256mb vram
- a third party LCD display with a low ms response time
- more ram.

How much ram do you have (normal ram not video card ram)?

By the way if you do go insane and change to an iMac, i would be very interested in buying your 1.8DP G5 if it becomes for sale.

Yes. I just underwent a similar upgrade and the new iMac seems significantly faster than both the G5 it replaced and my MacBook Pro. Obviously this is hard to quantify, but I think that, for the money that you'll be able to get for your G5 and your ACD, the actual price of the upgrade will be worth it for the improved performance, for the extra screen size, for the warranty, and for the knowledge that your system should be solid for a few years to come.

Oh, and after reading the above comment, I agree the need for upgradability is obviosuly a point to consider, but is not preclude the iMac from being an appropriate choice for many (or most) users.

Intel CPU stomps all over a G5 CPU - 'nuff said. Just surf around the net for benchmarks.

Take a closer look at the Mac Pro though - you can chuck in more RAM later, as well as more HDDs for RAID 0+1 performance and reliability.

But if you do go for the 24" iMac, it's a very fine machine. Make sure you get the 7600 GT video card and at least 2GB of RAM.

The 24" will be an excellent machine - but you will lose some of the features you enjoy when having a tower mac (i.e. expansion; 8 GB RAM; upgradeable AGP8X video cards; dual hard drives at up to 750 GB each; external monitor as opposed to integrated - and up to 30" at that)

Not True, my fathers new mac book pro 2.33ghz intel core 2 duo, doesn't even touch my powermac G5 Quad - it wishes it does :P

EDIT: In this comparison, a 1.8ghz G5 vs a dual core 2.33 ghz or 2.16ghz, there should be some form of difference.

An excellent point in general.

Specifically, though - macrob69, do you know where your slow point is in terms of WoW? If it's CPU or bus speed then go the iMac (shudder), if it's just a video card issue then just upgrade the video card (AND the main ram too).

If WoW is not your main consideration, the newer-spec warrantied iMac could be the go for these reasons too, especially if you roll the lease.

I suppose upgradeability and towers is less of an issue when leasing for 2 year terms than it is for outrighters, longer than that though...

I bought a MacBook 2GHz C2D last week... It blows my PowerMac G5 Dual Core 2.3GHz with 8GB RAM out of the water.

Does it come close at least?

Wrong. Intel Cpus are much faster and less power hungry than the G5s. Regardless of configuration. Of course your G5 quad outdoes a dualcore notebook chip... but try putting it up against a quad intel Mac Pro, and you'll see a different result.

My 2.1ghz C2D iMac encodes H.264 faster than my friends Dual 2.7 G5.

In fact it kicks ppc arse in every benchmark I've thrown at it. And runs a good deal cooler. Be wary though, the x1600 is a laptop version (x1600 mobility) and clocked significantly lower than the desktop version. In fact, apple clocks it considerably lower than the usual x1600 mobility.

I would say for pure openGL this card is about 15%-20% faster than my previous Radeon 9800 Pro.

I have no idea if the cards in the 24" are Geforce Go cards, or real desktop ones.

But when it comes to CPU related stuff, this thing stomps all over my Dual 2.0 G5, it beats out my friends Dual 2.7 G5, and in some benchmarks comes within a hairs breadth of a quad core 2.5 G5.

Screen is not as bright as my 20" cinema display was, it also has easy to detect bright spots in the screen corners that my cinema display did not have. Other than that, this machine is much much better than my G5.

With the right config it operates close to a 2.66ghz Intel Xeon Mac Pro and outperforms the 2ghz!

with the right config, the mac pro will utterly smash any benchmark the G5 attempts to throw at it.

Great feedback - I currently have 2gig of RAM - how would I know where it bottlenecks. If I turn in a circle in WoW in a busier area I have a real slowdown. I would emphasise that it is still eminently playable though - just anoying. Perhaps a new VideoCard??

I'd consider a new, low end PowerMac - but would I have to get a new monitor? I quite like this one.
apple_22_display__cc.jpg

...And if I do change, the old machine is listed here