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Hi all,

I have a G5 PowerMac 2.5 Quad with 8GB Ram & NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 (512) graphics card. Not to forget running OSX 10.5.2, my question is do you think it's time for me to upgrade my G5 and go MacPro or shall I hold on... Always wonder if the MacPro's are better considering there's always firmware updates on intel machines... Your views would be great thanks...

The frequent firmware updates are often bug fixes on the newer platform. I wouldn't factor them in unless they start delivering new features too.

The new Mac Pros are generally faster than a Quad today, especially the 8-cores on multithreaded apps. Is it worth an upgrade? We need to know what you use your G5 for to answer that.

As reader50 suggested, we need to know what heavy lifting you currently do with your G5.

If you can extend the lifecycle of that box to the later part of this year, or even into January of next year, you will probably be able to get a Nehalem powered Mac Pro. Thats the codename for the next microarchitecture change from Intel, and it will bring some decent jumps in performance.

With that said, at some point you do have to stop looking to the future and decide what is out now is what you need to replace an aging system. The current Mac Pros are very good machines, and I just bought one myself. With the general longer lifecycles of the Mac Pro, the revision in January is still quite new and doesn't run the risk of being replaced for a while.

If you want to upgrade `just because', then I'd tend to say no. And to me your post sounds like it. The Quad G5 was and is a very fast machine. Do you need something faster now?

In half a year or a year, computers will be significantly faster again, so people should primarily upgrade when they need to.

Guys your advised has been superb.. I guess I'm going to stick to my G5 for now... I shall wait for the next jump before getting a MacPro... thanks.

I honestly can't see the Quad G5 becoming insufficient for several more years. The machines are beasts. And so long as Apple continues to support PowerPC hardware with OS X, I will consider the PCIe-generation G5s modern hardware.

For no other reason than to agree with the above, unless you're finding things too slow on your G5, I don't think you'll find the new machines $3,000 faster. If you're running day-long video encodes and you need to cut that time in half, that's one thing. But if you only want a little more snappiness to things, I'd suggest a fast hard drive upgrade or two instead. Fast external RAID based on the new 300GB VelociRaptor drives or something like that.. 8 cores versus 4 isn't going to make resizing a Safari window any faster.

The answer is totally dependent upon what you use the machine for and you have not specified that.

-Allen Wicks

I think the last revision G5 is still pretty solid.

May be wait till WWDC and see.

Take a look at Apple - Mac Pro - Performance if you haven't already. It compares the quad G5 to the current Mac Pros.

If you're doing Photoshop work it's only 60% faster (assuming your workflow is similar to their benchmark), but if you're doing 3D rendering it's 200-300% faster (same assumption).

That you have the FX4500 suggests you're more like the latter than the former, so it may be a very worthwhile upgrade.