[SQLDba]

I am considering a purchase of a powermac - and wonder if I need to go to the expense of getting the Dual Proc box.

Please put aside the "never have too much mhz, money or ram" comments - I know that more is better here - but my question really is whether the applications that I would use - would benefit from the dual procs.

I would stick to some games (world or warcraft probably - maybe 10% of it's usage) The rest would be iLife applications - specifically iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Quicken, turbo tax - those kind of apps. A typical home user scenario

I don't own and won't buy Photoshop or any high end video editing tool - If I win at keno I might buy the cheap version of Final Cut - but I think iMovie will do most of what I need. I'd be more apt to buy a better video card or more RAM.

Are the applications I mentioned even dual proc aware?

Also - the PCI v.s. PCI-X. For the typical home user - who might add a second hard drive or upgrade video - what am I losing by not getting the PCI-X capability?

Thanks!

[chris v]

I encoded a video using iDVD the other night on my dual 2.0, and it took nearly an hour for 1 60 minute disk, and iDVD was using about 130-150 % of CPU the whole time. If you're going to be doing much video encoding at all, you'll see dramatic speed increases with a dual, I'd think.

[Taipan]

Hi!

If you are indecisive regarding the number of CPUs you are probably considering the single/dual 1.8 GHz machines, so PCI-X is not really an issue, because neither of those offers it. The benefits of PCI-X are pretty minimal anyway, I'm not sure if there are any PCI-X cards apart from SCSI-or Network-cards at all, and there are probably never going to be any, as the industry is going for PCI-Express.

[Big Mac]

This question has come up many times. Most everyone will say that dual processor Power Macs are "worth it." I personally do not think that the single processor G5s are good values. If you're going to get a single processor G5, you may as well get an iMac G5 instead (early quality assurance problems notwithstanding). One more thing, the G5 will be updated soon - late June at the latest (WWDC) - so if you're planning to buy the current revision I would wait.

[MORT A POTTY]

there is zero reason to get a single processor PowerMac over a dual processor PowerMac. the cost difference is easily justifiable by the performance increase. even if the specific apps didn't use both processors at all, you'd still get major benefits because if you're using two apps which aren't SMP-aware, then each one will still get their own processor anyhow

duals are definitely worth it.