[rondocap]

I am looking to buy the 2.7ghz G5, but as reference, I've also been looking at the Dell XPS Gen 5, since I understand PC technology a bit more than Macs.

Is there a way to know how the G5 would score in some of the tests that I read for the Dell? For example, the Dell got a SysMark 2004 benchmark score of 230 overall. What would a G5 2.7 with 1 gig of Ram likely get on the same test? (I don't know if this test is accesible for the mac, but if you had to guess in terms of numbers) For example, I also saw that someone's G5 got a 265 on an Xbench test. Is there a way to compare this number to the 230 Sysmark 2004 score on the Dell above?

I usually see the new G5's compared to previous or older G4's and the like. I want to read about G5 to PC comparisons, and especially benchmarks. Any links to this would be appreciated!

[OreoCookie]

Sysmark is a PC-only test, and even on PCs, it's pretty skewed.

What do you want to do with your machine?

[Lateralus]

Benchmarks are becoming more and more worthless, especially for cross-platform comparisons.

Real world applications testing is just about the only relevant comparison you can do.

[rondocap]

The primary use will be music, i.e Finale notation (very large scores with plugins), and Orchestral sample libraries.

The secondary use besides normal web browsing and the like, is a bit of gaming. (Battlefield/Doom3)

Another concern I have is the technology in the G5. I know it is a fast system, but for the tasks mentioned above, shouldn't the Dell XPS Gen 5 be much faster? For example:

1. I would get the stock 250gig hard drive with the G5, but 2x 160 hard drives with Raid 0 on the Dell. How much faster would the raid be? I know i can raid the G5 later, but I want to see the 250 alone vs a raid setup.

2. G5 ram runs at 400mhz, while this system is 667mhz. Isn't that a considerable difference? Will real world apps be affected?

3. As far as the processor is concerened, I think the dual 2.7 should be as good or better than the dual core 3.2 P4, although I am unsure.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by rondocap

The primary use will be music, i.e Finale notation (very large scores with plugins), and Orchestral sample libraries.

The secondary use besides normal web browsing and the like, is a bit of gaming. (Battlefield/Doom3)

Another concern I have is the technology in the G5. I know it is a fast system, but for the tasks mentioned above, shouldn't the Dell XPS Gen 5 be much faster? For example:

1. I would get the stock 250gig hard drive with the G5, but 2x 160 hard drives with Raid 0 on the Dell. How much faster would the raid be? I know i can raid the G5 later, but I want to see the 250 alone vs a raid setup.

2. G5 ram runs at 400mhz, while this system is 667mhz. Isn't that a considerable difference? Will real world apps be affected?

3. As far as the processor is concerened, I think the dual 2.7 should be as good or better than the dual core 3.2 P4, although I am unsure.

Select your software first... then choose your machine.
Do the music apps you want to use exist on the Mac? Could you use something like Logic Pro or another Mac-optimized application? I don't know too much about music applications to be honest, but I do know that Logic Pro is heavily Mac/G5 optimized.

As for RAID, you can check out www.barefeats.com for some MacOS X RAID tests. They've got several different setups benchmarked there.

The PC you're talking about uses DDR2 RAM (667MHz) while the G5 uses DDR (400MHz). The catch is that DDR2 has significantly higher latencies than plain DDR. The bottom line is they are virtually the same in terms of speed/throughput. Even the very high-end Athlon FX-55 uses plain-jane DDR RAM.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by rondocap

The primary use will be music, i.e Finale notation (very large scores with plugins), and Orchestral sample libraries.

The secondary use besides normal web browsing and the like, is a bit of gaming. (Battlefield/Doom3)

Another concern I have is the technology in the G5. I know it is a fast system, but for the tasks mentioned above, shouldn't the Dell XPS Gen 5 be much faster? For example:

1. I would get the stock 250gig hard drive with the G5, but 2x 160 hard drives with Raid 0 on the Dell. How much faster would the raid be? I know i can raid the G5 later, but I want to see the 250 alone vs a raid setup.

2. G5 ram runs at 400mhz, while this system is 667mhz. Isn't that a considerable difference? Will real world apps be affected?

3. As far as the processor is concerened, I think the dual 2.7 should be as good or better than the dual core 3.2 P4, although I am unsure.

1. You can create a RAID 0 with a Mac, too. But I strongly advise against it on a production system! If one harddrive fails, all your data is gone.

2. Not likely. As explained above, DDR2 has no performance benefit yet. (Longer latency, but higher data rate vs. lower latency and lower data rate.)

3. Depends on your app. For media apps, the hardware/software architecture is often considered superior to Windows. It will be slower in games, mostly because the graphics card drivers won't be as tweaked for games as in the PC world (sometimes drivers are even tweaked on a per-game basis.