*DAMN R6 Forum

I just started this thread to talk about the new software,panthar,hardware, and other new products at the WWDC and of course the Keynote which is going on right now.

they just announced the G5.  Wooohoooo!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it![/size] 8)






(I know the gossip was out, but it's now confirmed! ;D )

This is the one rease that it can happen that u see me on GR very soon . AGAIN .

THIS COMPUTER IS OWSOME AND KICK ASS.

APPLE did their best work for years !

 While I've got the money to get the top of the line G5, I plan to wait.

Right now, both my laptop and my desktop can run everything that's out so far. The only places where I have problems are Omaha Beach ( Medal of Honor - everything on highest ), and UT 2003 with everything on highest. Because of this, I plan to wait until there are games out that I don't have the power to run at over 35FPS, then I'll probably get a new G5.  

Yeah Baby yeah! That's what I waited for ;D I'll get mine in January(at least dual 2Ghz) after the probably first revision and speed bumps.

From half the PC speed to "double" PC speed is a great and very important step for Apple. I love the great architecture of the new Macs however there are still some things that bug me!

I think if I buy a Mac for 3000bucks I at least should get the top notch graphic card! Not a shabby 64MB VRAM midrange consumer card! Even the G4 top model had a Titanium as standard with 128MB VRAM but yet I have to pay additional 300bucks for a video card.  >:(

Another thing that disturbs me is that because of the new design I can only get 2 HDs into my Mac and not 4 as before. I would like to have one disk for my system and mp3s and 2 250Gbyte disks as Raid 0(double datarate) for video editing and games... Further have you noticed that in the Apple Store one 250disk costs 150bucks and 2 650. I think that must be a fault.

Last but not least I don't understand why they built in 4x superdrives although 8x superdrives are already available!

What do you think about the design? First I was totaly shocked, but eventually I started to like it. All in all it is a typical "Form follows Function" design and half the noise sounds great.

Yep to sum up my first impressions: APPLE ROCKZ!!!! even there are some very tiny cosmetic faults (http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~damnr6/yabbse/YaBBImages/beer.gif)

My apple stocks are moving up to the sky  ;D

Mauti
ps.: I merged this thread with Rapid's poll!

I just read about it! Oh god, it's freaking awsome! I would be buying one, but I don't have the heart to learn Mac OC.. If I could run Debian Linux or BLFS on it I would deff. shell out the money. That is SO nice! Jesus!

BTW, if your all thinking wtf is a PC guy saying a Mac is better, wtf? I am not saying a Mac is better. I personally don't care about who makes the hardware. I like the best :) The OS is the choice I like. So I use x86/Linux not Mac/OS X. I would be using a 64-bit Mac CPU anyday over a x86-32. Why? Because it's NOT about the hardware or who makes it!!

Hi Romulus,

Nedaf wanted to talk with you. Back to topic: damn it I just realised that the new G5 PowerMac has also only one optical bay next to the 2HD bays. Old G4 had  4HD bays and 2optical bays. That's definatley a step back  :( Romulus since you are using Linux as your OS choice you don't play games, do you!? I personally have to work much with Linux at university and I must say it is overrated if you want a system that works for you and not were you work for the system... What the hell do you do on Linux, I honestly don't see the purpose of it except getting a lot of developers together under the OpenSource license???

Mauti
ps.: nevertheless I'm happy that Bucc and his MacHack conspiracy were proven wrong  ;)

I'd wager that you don't know how to install anything but gentoo linux on a PC, And yes you can run debian on a mac. Anyhow bsd owns you blah blah blah NOOB.

The new towers are nice, i want to wait and get the dual 2ghz because it will be much faster, besides its only 1k more.

Gentoo? Hah! I bet he runs Red Hat straight from the box.

Mauti, there is no point to Linux if you can afford Mac hardware. The only thing that you can do on a Linux x86 box that you can't do on a Mac is play a few games using WINE. Of course, most of the games that actually run in WINE are ported natively to OS X so it's not saying much.

Back to topic how do you rate the design and the low HD /optical drive expansion bays!? Does it matter for you?

Mauti

(http://a772.g.akamai.net/7/772/51/73314e34e25de2/www.apple.com/powermac/images/indexfamily06232003.jpg)

SHMEXXY, VERY SHMEXXY

Mauti, I think only two HD bays is just fine. You can fit over 300 GB easily, 500 GB if you get big enough drives. If you need any more than that, you can add Firewire drives to your hearts content.

I've heard some people bitching about only one optical drive bay, but I've never seen a need for two. I'll be fine.

another thing depending how much music you have if you put them in AIFF form you can save space because AIFF takes up less space then MP3 form

Wow....I am extremely impressed, and I'll probably get a nice dual 2GHz if I can afford one come September.  I hadn't really expected these things to start thrashing Xeons  O.o

Looks like they do very nicely in the gaming sector, as well.  In the Quake III benchmarks, the G5 outperformed the fastest Pentium 4 at 640x480x16 by over 80 FPS (G5 had 359, P4 had 277).  At 1024x768x32, the G5 bested the P4 by over 60 FPS (G5 had 337, P4 had 275).  Excellent.

The nice thing about 2 optical bays is the ability to buy a cheap CD or CDRW that's really fast and drop it in there, since the Superdrives are slow on the read.  Not a big deal and I bet 99% of the users out there never added anything to that bay.  

With 2 internal HD's that is plenty too.  You can stripe them and make a super fast drive, leave them as two, whatever.  But like Ace said, you can have 500 - 600 GB's of data right there if you want it.  Besides being able to run external Firewire, you can also buy a raid card and connect to a huge ass RAID if that's your need.  

I don't need to upgrade any time soon, but oh do I want to.  Must resist, must hide credit card.

As for choices, I know that some people are on a budget, but looking at the specs and the prices, everyone should go for the dual 2.0GHz.  Look how little of a jump it is over the single 1.8GHz.  You are talking about a $600 dollar difference (well, $550 if you back it up to the same video card).  You can easily save another $200 by getting the Combo Drive and not the Superdrive (how many of you actually use the DVD Burner?)

btw, Cow, step away from the bong.  AIFF takes up less space then MP3?  I think you mean AAC.  AIFF is the format that's used on the CD itself.

I think the new Apple G5 is great, has lots of new features and enhancements.  Can't wait to try out the ichat av, and safari.

Onto the future:  :D
In January, wherever the next expo will be, I'm guessing Boston
Hardware:
G5 Powerbooks
1.2ghz,1.4ghz,1.6ghz and ATImobility radeon 9600 graphic cards
Revised G5 Desktops
1.8ghz,2ghz,dual 2.2ghz ATI Radeon 9800 Pro,nvidia 5800fx
iMac Speed bump and graphic card bumps
800mhz,1ghz,1.2ghz nvidia 5200fx graphic cards

Back to the topic, at first I thought the design of the G5 looked awkward, but as I kept looking at it I began to like it like Mauti.  I like the one optical drive due to the fact I know I will never use the 2nd one.  The dual 2ghz is a deal...faster speed,more ram, but same graphic card. I think Apple is widening the difference between the G5 and Xserve in HD storage..."if you want more storage buy an xserve, if not just buy a G5"

i dont know about G5 powerbooks, there were problems with cooling the G4 powerpooks and ibooks and the new G5 is a cooling masterpiece, it will take some insane enginering to put a G5 in a laptop saftely.  The Grfx cards are kinda lame though  =/ raedon 9800 is nice though... more will come with the new computers and 10.3 then an increase in marketshare hopefully but there was also an article in slashdot saying Linux desktops with surpass apple desktops in marketshare.  "say it aint so!"
moooooooo

Well, I love design, and I gotta say, the new G5 is very effective, and sexy ;D  

The only thing that worries me, is dust, since dust can cause problems in your circuits.  Then again, I haven't been able to see if there's a special screen I'm not seeing, made just for that.  Knowing Mac, probably.  The silver look is very rewarding, and very well used by Mac.  Reminds me of the Mercedes or Lexus.  Hell, get a fast enough one, and you're almost paying like one! ;D  All in all, excellent design work by Mac. (http://community.the-underdogs.org/smiley/happy/thumb.gif)

First great screenshots of the new G5 in real(not the render pics on Apple site) can be found at http://www.envestco2.com/g5/ (http://www.envestco2.com/g5/)! - I don't like the white keyboard and does anyone know if Apple already brought back the start button on the keyboard? This is especially important for PowerMacs when they don't stand near the desktop..

The reason why I would like to have seen 2 optical bays is that the integrated drives are slow AND! I can't do CD - CD burning. I would have loved to put in a superfast 58 - 24 - 58 CD burner for cheap 130bucks.

Of course 500Gbyte is enough but with my current experience(2 complete HD losses in 3 years) I would like to have one save disk for my system and mp3s and a dynamical/superfast Raid for my games and video cutting...

However I love the integrated optical sound in/outputs. Finally you can plug your Minidisk or surround receiver without quality loses(well I don't own neither).

I'm also excited about the new Panther - I hope it finally feels as fast as my MacOS9.

Last but not least does the annoucment 3Ghz within 12months influence your decision to buy a G5 now!? Or do you think eventually there will always come out a faster one?

All in all the change from G3 400 - G5 Dual 2000 will be outstanding.  ;D

Mauti

the Graficscard arent that bad - ok the GF  FX is lowend - but IF u wand something with Power and low price get the 9600Pro.
I have it in my PC and it works great! Noone really needs the 9800Pro! Its owsome but also expensive, so pay the 80$ extra for the ATI 9600PRO and have fun with all new and coming games!

This time Apple did a complete good job. Good Graficscards, and other good hardware. Only one thing isnt good in my eye! To less RAM in the small machine and the middle Machine - they could have put in more by standart for the same price!

But in my case i can compansate it in taking the DVD/CD-RW intead of the DVD-R . B/c i dont need this thing! and Buy a cheap RAM in the next Hardwarestore. Same works with the middle machine! And this is the one u would get ! I dont need the hight end thingy but the middle is real nice!

Is the G5 cooled by water?

no it has 5 independent cooling areas and 9 fans yet it is half the noise of the G4

looks like PC people dug deep and pointed out the obvious that the SPEC tests were tweeked, read -->
http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

He's a pc weenie.

 ;)

Well, Apple sure knows how to design a computer, but they sure as hell don't know what to do with a mouse. STILL a one button deal. Seriously.. how long does it take to design a two button wheel mouse? C'mon Apple, let's have a real mouse.

Shit, I expect this stuff from PC users but not from Mac people. BUY A TWO BUTTON MOUSE. That's what I did. That said, I used the one button for years with basically no problems.

The reason Apple will never get rid of the one button mouse is that they design their stuff to be usable for the most novice user and on up. Apple's one button mouse is to mice as OS X is to Unix. Unix is something that can be extremely powerful and useful to those who know it, but it can be confusing for new users. So what Apple did was make OS X hide the *nix underbelly by default but still allow power users to access it. With mice, there is the same situation of being a powerful tool for those who are used to it, but potentially confusing for those just starting off. People new to computers can have difficulty with the whole left-click/right-click setup, so Apple only puts one button on their mouse, thus eliminating the confusion. Apple still caters to the power users by including contextual menus and the like (which can be accessed by one button users with the help of the keyboard) for two button mice. Additionally, any USB mouse you plug in is going to work unless it doesn't conform to the USB specifications.

I have bought a two button mouse.. but seriously.. NO other computer company I know sells a computer with a one button mouse. My point merely is, Apple could easily design a sweet looking two button wheel mouse and include it with all its computers. They just haven't.

Two buttons being confusing to use? Puh-lease. My own grandma knows which of the two buttons to press. I mean, c'mon. How hard is it to figure out which button to click? If you can't figure that one out, you DESERVE a one button mouse. If Apple is truly catering to that kind of idiots, I'm not sure if I want to be seen using their computers.

um dude, they are releasing a 2 button mouse with scroll wheel its comming out in a few weeks prolly

I'll believe it when I see it. And then I'll thank the good lord for it.

     He's a Mac user who is justifiably incensed that Apple is STILL resorting to these cheap tricks instead of just dropping it and pointing up the many advantages of the Mac (it's just that speed is not one of them). When Steve said "We'd like to announce the Fastest Personal Computer In The World," my marketing BS alarm went off. I thought back to the last time Apple had made a claim like that. They lied. They're lying this time, too. It doesn't mean that I don't want a G5, but it does mean that Apple is playing the game wrong. The only people they're fooling with the faked benchmarks are Apple users and really uncritical PC users. If they were pouring their massive ad budget into playing up the Mac as just a really great machine, they'd be winning PC people over, which is known as "increasing market share".

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/242154256&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=181
 
 from slashdot. Apple explains:
 
 "Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement.  Read on for the details.              
 
  Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.  
 
 He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware.  To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.  
 
 He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.  
 
 Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower.  The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled.  He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.  
 
 In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available.  For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems.  Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).  
 
 As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).  "

     Keep in mind that the benchmarks were heavily tweaked to be favorable to the G5 and crippling to the Dell. The G5s are much faster than anything Apple's put out before, but they're still not "PC crushers".

     Concerning the limited number of bays, I agree it's disappointing, but FireWire will save the day (and allow hot-swappability, too).

     Just a note to anyone buying a G5 in the near future: DO NOT GET NVIDIA CARDS. At present, Nvidia is gobbling the cock and coming back for seconds. ATI is the lord and master of the GPU market for the near future. The GeForce 5800FX is the "blow dryer" model that takes up two slots in your computer, and is the top of the line. Yet, it is slower than the Radeon 9700 Pro. The GeForce 5600 and 5200 are both very much slower than the 5800. The Radeon 9800 Pro is, according to Computer Games' benchmarks, anywhere from 5-25% faster than the 9700 Pro, depending on task. I don't know any stats on the 9600, unfortunately. In short, if you get a G5, shell out the extra money for the Radeon 9800. It's currently the absolute top of the line GPU in the market, and it'll run anything well for a good long time.

     Interesting. I'd be pleased if Apple posted a full set of benchmark results, with various options enabled and disabled. That would be most enlightening.

Yeah, I agree, Loth.

I think its unfair that the Author of the article says the tests apple did were tweeked yet he assumes the PC tests were not, everyone tweeks benchmarks now a days but Cobra that is good stuff.

Not entirely true anymore Loth. The NVidia 5800 was bs but they have released now a 59000 FX Ultra and if you search for it at http://www.tomshardware.com you will notice that this card is now the king among the graphic cards.

Of course Apple stats are manipulated nevertheless realapp performance is fantastic and that what's count.

Nobody really knows how powerful the new G5 is yet. Once they are released we will see.  I see it more than a great Apple marketing - so much free advertising on all PC sites(even if negative at the moment)!

I love this article from my favourite Techsite: arstechnica.com (http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/03q2/wwdc/wwdc.html)

You can bet your money that once many G5s are available there will be thousands of benchmarks. All in all I see it very cool how all PC sites immediatly jump on the wagon to bash Apple hehe. It would be too fun if Apple would release totaly tweaked benchmarks for Apple and beat the so high praised Intel tweaked benchmarks... ah the face of the bashing PC websites would be prizeless. Even if Apple doesn't beat them I need a great photoshop performance(my iMac 400 is still very fast for pics up to 1600*1200) and video cutting performance where a damn 30second long aged movie filter with 72subsettings doesn't need over 2 hours to render...!

Read the arstechnica article it is really very well written.

Bye,

Mauti

I wrote an email to Haxial in response to the very critical article at http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/ :

"Hi,

I appreciate that you take a look closer at the Apple specs and that you try to find out the truth!

However I read that you doubt Apple's statement that the Dell machine was faster without Hyperthreading disabled. You can even find this at Dell's website! So at this point Apple speaks the truth!

"With Hyper-Threading enabled, system performance decreased 6 to 9 percent on the CPU2000 speed tests and decreased 27 to 37 percent on the CPU2000 throughput tests. The results indicate that compute-intensive workloads similar to those used in the CPU2000 benchmark will not greatly benefit from the Hyper-Threading capability; these workloads do not spend significant execution time waiting for data from either memory or I/O transactions. In addition, the CPU2000 workload is primarily single-threaded, leaving little opportunity for TLP, which Hyper-Threading relies on to increase performance."

More can be found here: http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/power_ps3q02-khalid.htm

All in all we will see how fast the G5 perform once they are shipped. On a side note, I surfed around the web and found some early IBM announced estimated 970 specs with SPEC 2000 numbers over 1000!  I personally think that the truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle and to use the same compiler isn't wrong as it is. Well you can screw that but why the hell should Apple then turn off HT for Dell's spec tests!? Some controversial questions.

...."

Ok back to learning...

Mauti

I'm stealing this line from somebody else, but it is just too classic.

In the computer marketing industry there are only 3 things: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.

I don't really give a crap about the SPEC numbers for the G5. All that matters is once I get one in my hands and can do some real world tests in it. Then I'll find a buddy with an Athlon64 or Opteron to compare it against in the real world.

Also, does it really matter that much about the speed? We have been lagging far behind for a while now, but the G5 has put us right back on the map. We may be slightly ahead, dead even, or slightly behind based on who you believe, but there is no denying that we are in the ballpark. If we have a processor that can crunch raw numbers about as fast as an x86, we still come out on top cuz it goes in a beautiful Apple-designed system running the greatest OS on the planet.

quite true, Ace. I'd like to see some benchmarks comparing the new G5 to the old G4 800MHz - 1.4 GHz. I like to see the new machines as a big step forward inside the Mac product line. It doesn't really matter if we/Apple's machines are little faster or little slower than actual PC's; what matters is that they are way faster than the old machines.

     Something that occurred to me an hour or two after watching the keynote replay is that there was no mention of the "piles" interface in Panther. I wonder if that was scrapped, or if they just didn't bother to play it up?

Piles, you say???

maybe 10.4? its a pretty big deal i could see them taking another year or so on that project, changing the entire file system.

     It doesn't have anything to do with changing the file system. It's just putting a visual metaphor around a number of documents, so that they appear to the user to be a coherent collection.

     From the rumor-type "demos" that I saw, a pile has an icon representing a stack of paper or documents, and when you click on it, it "expands" into a listing of all files in the pile. I believe you can also open everything in the pile at once, although I may be imagining that.

Ive kinda missed out on the 'piles' project... could you enlighten me on its existance? Somthing like wtf is piles?  ;)

Elandrion, I saw some benchmarks comparing the new G5's to the 1GHz G4.  I'll find the link for you, but roughly 2 - 3 times faster on the tests.

But even then, the benchmarks don't really test the overall system, just the CPU (and even then, not always well).  The faster bus, pci bus, hard drives and video card.  The only tests that mean anything are the real world apps.  

BFG - Piles is a User Interface idea that was highly touted by the UI experts of the world.  It was going to be part of the Copeland release (the OS that never was).  It's been rumored that Piles, or at least some elements from it will be in OSX.  These rumors have been going on since 10.1, but keep getting louder and louder with each release.

I saw something conceptual about it a year or so ago, and I wasn't a big fan (it shifted the focus from files and folders to stacks of objects based on time of creation / modification).  This could be way off, since it was a UI presentation I was at, not anything by Apple.  I'm sure there's more out there on the web about it though, at least a better description then the one I just gave.

Ahh ty bucc. Missed out on that one... And gave up waiting for Copland  ;)
If it is working on the principle of what you were saying, Piles sounds like a very interesting GUI. Yeah ive been reading a lot about trying to move new GUI's into somthing (heh like Jobs said..) more user orientated and less system orientated). The concepts of UI based on time creation sounds pretty wild... and i must say im not leaping of my chair at it.. But then again Apple does have a history of coming up with revolutionary GUI's ;0)

Oh and i think the biggest thing guys should be looking at apart from the 64bit processing is the Sheer scale of the System Bus. Its freaking huge, and i think this will have a very much more significant effect on speed and future inprovments than perhaps people freaking about the processors being ramped up a 100Mhz or somthing. The pure ability to store massive amounts of information in RAM without having to write to Disk must have absolutly Huge significance for RAM hungry programs such as Adobe Photoshop

I just hope that Apple can tweak the OS to actually use the RAM.  I am one of those guys that adds every bit of RAM possible to the system, and it pisses me off to find that the system is still running virtual memory when there are 1.5 freaking gigs of real RAM there.  

Right now, real memory used ~128MB, virtual memory used ~720MB  and available RAM is 1.5GB.  Now explain to me how the system is faster using all the VM when real RAM is available?  Actually, I think I'll ask that on the Apple forums =D.

As for the Piles, according to this article from the Register ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/30360.html ) it sounds like it's meta data based, not time based, but also sounds like the presentation I saw in other ways.