are PC faster than Macs?

[Commodus]

Originally posted by: aka1nas

Commodus, you just don't get it. You are comparing RETAIL prices that an individual pays for components to Apple's system price. If Apple surprised everyone tomorrow with an Opteron workstation with the abovementioned specs, it surely would not cost them nearly as much as an individual pays for parts. Likewise, if you could buy all the components that come in the G5 machine as an individual they would likely cost you much more than the system price Apple quotes you. A more fair comparison would be a prebuilt workstation with those specs (to be fair, I don't know if Sun or anyone else is doing dual dual-core Opteron workstations yet).

The problem is that OEMs aren't necessarily cheaper. Look at BOXXtech as proof. Alienware offers dual dual-core Opterons as well, and the pricing problem is fairly similar. Sun? They have a dual Opteron workstation, but with single-core chips only. It looks like you have to go to local stores to find workstations that will be both reasonably cheap and pre-assembled (I just did this at a local store's config page, and the price was about $4100 versus the $4000 of Apple's G5 Quad).

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: Commodus
Every step of the way? Drop the hyperbole. A G5 Quad is going to use high-quality components too, and given your price premium the Mac user could have his 250 GB included drive AND a 400 GB secondary drive. The advantage the Opteron has is memory latency because of the on-die controller, not sheer bandwidth (remember there's a 1.25 GHz data bus per dual-core G5 chip).

I was talking about the setup I lister compared to your Opteron setup. Not to mention it would best the Mac too and be well worth the price premium. Tyan Thunder K8WE rapes the G5s motherboard badly. Maybe you didn't realize it supports up to 12800MB/s bandwidth when you at least 2 RAM sticks per CPU, like in my 2x512+2x512 configuration to a NUMA aware OS? Dual x16 PCIe for Quadro SLI. 3 PCI-X slots for high powered RAID HBAs. With a 250GB hard drive, plain 6600, and Norco rack case it will shave the price premium to $150 over your Mac.

Originally posted by: Commodus
There is a potential incentive for external Firewire drives: if you need off-site backup for your data, you want a way to separate the backup from the computer itself. External drives are particularly good because they not only let this happen, but they can be physically much larger than a typical 3.5" drive. On a side note: the person who claimed that FW800 drives don't use up the extra bandwidth probably hasn't seen some of LaCie's more recent drives. In some past cases, the bridge chip in the external drive wasn't making efficient use of the bandwidth.

iSCSI? iSAS? iSATA? Gigabit NAS/SAN? There are more than one way to skin a cat at reasonable cost... at least for PCs. Not to mention

On the comparison of processor links, what I know is that G5 systems (even my iMac G5) use Hypertransport as well, so that end of the equation is less of an issue. Each core has its own 1 MB of L2 cache so it doesn't have to go to a unified memory cache per dual-core chip. Apple's technology overview PDF doesn't say much about the specifics, but notes that each processor bus being bi-directional means that the two distinct processors can see each other's caches more quickly.

Opteron's don't have unified cache either.

 

[Fox5]

Based on reviews on the Internet, both synthetic and actual programs, Opterons rape the G5s in everything except SIMD performance. (and even there, the G5s typically don't rape the opterons)

 

[NewBlackDak]

Let's slam the door on the sound myth too. A dual 2.7 or quad 2.5 G5 is by no mean silent!
Here are some cases where my G5 is louder than every PC in my house(including the cheap ones that I didn't even try to silence):
running photoshop with large raw images
using pitstop on a large PDF
printing a huge page in InDesign
Doing something complicated in Illustrator
encoding something for quicktime streaming server
running apple remote desktop with several clients
Compiling large projects

That's most of the suff I have to do on my machine. With dual monitors, I usually have two of those taks running at any one time. Mine sounds like a dustbuster for the entire time I'm there.

 

[Commodus]

Originally posted by: Fox5
Based on reviews on the Internet, both synthetic and actual programs, Opterons rape the G5s in everything except SIMD performance. (and even there, the G5s typically don't rape the opterons)

Oh really?

Some of the tests in the above link are Mac-only, as some apps like Motion are Mac-only, but notice how the G5 Quad stacks up when cross-platform tests come up. The Adobe After Effects test is pretty significant, because that's not a very well-optimized app for Macs compared to Photoshop, and yet the G5 Quad pretty much hangs with the quad Opteron 275 box, winning a few sub-tests and losing others slightly. The quad Opteron 280 box is the only system that invariably pulls away... and of course, that will definitely cost more.

Are there areas where you wouldn't want a G5 Quad? Of course! I wouldn't buy one for gaming (anyone who's willing to blow $3300 on a gaming system, but buys a PowerPC-based Mac, is a masochist), and I know some server apps aren't always served well by a Mac. But it's not as though Macs can't sometimes do things better than their Windows counterparts.