OSNews

Every time i read i review about an Apple product it seems that the writer has always to come with some comments which are very uninformative like if those authors need to say something that they do not like on the product, which is ok, but very often it end up with not very correct comments.

If i read this,
"The PowerMac G5 is a frustrating machine. As a piece of hardware, it is inferior in almost every way to the Athlon X2 machine sitting next to it. That is not to say that it is a bad piece of hardware, but rather that it can't match up to a very excellent machine. However, software is what counts and OS X is the platform that runs the applications I want to run. For that reason alone, the PowerMac isn't going anywhere any time soon."

Well ok, the thing which amazes me is "piece of hardware, it is inferior in almost every way to the Athlon X2 machine".

Well its surprising because its wrong and unfair to say that. I mean the author wants to make people believe that the power mac G5 which has 19 thermal sensors, 9 independent fans, 4 differents thermal zones, each thermal zone is independently controled by the os, each fan is independently controled by the os, an aluminum case for easy thermal conduction and which is designed for easy flow of the air from front to back, extremely easy access to the machine interior with one door to open, ....... with all of this ........that the hardware is inferior. Ohhh its somehow too much lack of honesty....

We have dual 2.7 ghz G5s in our lab, thats a very quite machine, quiter than any other similar dual processor pc that we have in the lab.
With this if i had this comment

"For the extra $700, the PowerMac is slower, louder, uses cheaper parts, and runs OS X. The mathematics of the situation are clear. If OS X is worth an extra $700 plus performance and silence to the buyer, the PowerMac is a good value."

Slower? Why? To what i saw in those tests i don't think the we can conclude that the G5 is slower, its definetly a better machine for people who have to deal with floating point performance, and i can use different tests to show that its even stonger than that. Why can't the author qualify his conclusion? And the conclusion about the price is woooo!!

I mean hey!!! does the author compare both configurations in fairness? The G5 supports ECC memory, the X2 not, The G5 supports up to 16 GB, the X4 only 4 GB at max. So just the ECC is much than worth the 700$ difference than he is talking about. I would say that this X2 is more a gamer machine, for a pro user who need reliable machine which can handle large computational problems, the G5 is definetely better. Moreover how many Gigabit contolers does the X2 machines has (the G5 has two)? How many PCIExpress slots does it have? Are they connected to the southbridge controler (if so it can limit the throughput of any devices which is connected via PCIExpress or if the computer has to handle high network tasks, or both), or are they directly connected to the System controler like the G5 for maximum throughtput? There are lot of more things to compare to conclude about the price advantage of both machines.

What about the software. Osx comes with something that is very important if the machine has to be used in scientific research. OS X comes with out of the box powerful high perforance libraries (the Accelerate framework) that allows people to write very fast code very easily. An example. Any one who wish could get much better performance (than those obtained by the author) for FFT computation by using vDSP, which takes care of any vectorization, and yes it suports double precison FFT too. This kind of things very important for people who the G5 is aimed to, and do not come out of the box with Linux. One AMD you would to have to get their library. I used it sometimes, and believe me its slower that the Accelerate framework, and much much less intuitive to use.

So comparing to machines its not an easy thing, many, many factors come to play ib the final decision. Again in the perpective of using the two machines in a pro environment, the G5 is clearly better than a machine built wih an Athlon X2 (on amd you would have to get machines with Opterons for the same target much more expensive than a powermac G5).