Hey, just signed up for the forums – first post – anyway.
Right now I’m running a 2.4 PIV Northwood system w/ a pretty unspectacular 512 megs of DDR-3700, a 40gig IBM 60GXP IDE drive for the OS partition, and an ATI 9600XT. As you can tell most of the hardware is pretty dated, most of it was purchased back around January, and even then it wasn’t exactly top of the line. Lately I’ve been running more and more processes at a time and I’ve become pretty unhappy with the multitasking performance of the box.
A year ago I had built a Dual Athlon MP 1900 system w/ 2 gigs of DDR-2100 and an IDE RAID 0 array. Needless to say I’ve been looking at SMP systems again. I’ve been pricing Dual Opteron 250’s, but unfortunately they’re $800 a processor, two of which plus a supporting motherboard would cost around $2100 – without memory. So I’ve been looking at the Dual 1.8 G5 system but I’m wondering if it’s worth the upgrade to the Dual 2.0 or the Dual 2.5. With my education discount the price of the Dual 2.0 is close to the Dual 1.8 (no discount). In either case I plan on removing the SATA drive and replacing with a SCSI drive array. I want to run three Maxtor Atlas 15k II drives in a RAID 5 array (btw does anyone know a good U320 SCSI RAID controller that’s supported under OS X? And why doesn’t Apple ship its desktop stations with options for SCSI storage systems anymore?) but I understand there are only two internal bays available and obviously only one 5.25” bay which is occupied by the super drive – so how do people run RAID arrays beyond a two drive RAID 1 or 0 in the G5 case – aside from buying an X-Serve?
I understand the difficulties in running accurate benchmarks across platforms, so I’m not going to argue with the numbers that are out there (although dual Opteron motherboards support 12gigs of DDR memory at minimum which seems to be an advantage over the G5’s 8gig support, not to mention that the G5 servers don’t scale beyond 2 way systems.) This will be used primary as a workstation computer for 2d content creation – I know either platform would run my applications fast enough, so at this point it’s an issue of value for the dollar.
Thanks for any input,
Drew
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