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CIA · Oct 23, 2005, 01:47 PM

I do not know if this is a Games or Peripherals question, but since I am asking for gaming, I guess it goes here.
I ordered a Quad G5 for the video work I do. I got the 6600 option, as the QUADRO is $$$, and the 7800 seems to be.....vaporware at the moment.
I am moving up from a dual 800 Quicksilver, 1.5GB Ram, and Ati 9800 Pro 128MB video card.
What is better? My 9800 pro (not that shabby a card) or the 6600? I don't know anything about the 6600 other then it is from the same family as the 6800. (And the 7800 is the, um, next-generation processor from Nvidia) How does the 6600 compare to the 9800?
Gaming is not so hot on the Quicksilver, although Halo is OK with the 9800, and DOOM III is.... not. I don't play a ton of games on the mac, but it would be nice to know what I have in store for me. I've been cracking out on FFXI online for PS2 for 1 1/2 years now. I'm scared to play WoW. I have invested so much into FFXI that starting from scratch in a new MMORPG would kill me.

RayK · Oct 28, 2005, 09:59 AM

THe computer with the 6600 will be leaps above what you are playing on now. The 6600 is faster than the 9800 on the PC side so its safe to say it will be the same for the mac side. If you wanted to have the smoothest games I'd opt for the 7800 which you can now order from the Apple store I'm told.

WoW is a lot of fun, but many of my friends that played it and FF XI quit WoW and went back to it. I wasn't a big fan of FF XI when I played so I stayed with WoW and love it.

RayK · Oct 28, 2005, 10:03 AM

Its seems I lied... in similar systems the 9800 Pro is faster in some tests. They are close to each other though. Link: http://firingsquad.com/hardware/gefo...ium4/page2.asp

It will still be much faster than what you have now. Doom 3 should be very playable. Just stock up on the RAM.

P · 04:39 PM

The question is mostly irrelevant, because the old Quicksliver uses AGP and your new quad uses PCI Extreme . You can't switch the boards to compare in any case. I think the games you're playing are more CPU-limited than you might think, so the G5 is always going to be faster, but I might as well answer for the fun of it.

The 9600 and the 6600 both have 8 pixel pipeliines. The 6600 has 6 vertex shaders while the 9800 is limited to 4, and also supports DirectX 9 shader model 3.0. Doesn't mean too much on OS X where OpenGL is the only game in town, but the 6600 might support a newer version of the OpenGL whenever they get around to finalizing any standrad again. The 9800 Pro, on the other hand, has a higher memory bandwidth at 340 MHz DDR vs. the 6600 at 275 MHz DDR and a higher core clock of 380 MHz vs. 300 MHz. I guess you could say that the less complicated (=older engine) a game is, the faster the 9800 will be comparatively. The 6600, OTOH, is better equipped to handle the more advanced games of the future.

The 7800 GT, which is what Apple sells, has 20 pipelines, a higher clockspeed on everything (425 MHz core/525 MHz RAM) and an even newer core. When it eventually shows up, I suspect it will be some 3 times the speed of the 6600.

CIA · 10:56 AM

I guess it's a moot point now. Once I saw that apple finally listed the 7800 as an option, I called and changed my order, so now I will have it. This pushed my ship date waaaay back, but whatever. If it ever comes I will have a nice machine again. Should last many years, unless the liquid cooling goes kaput.
And yes, I will put 2.5GB ram into it to start, and the boot drive will be 2x74GB Raptors in a RAID, with a 160GB firewire as a mirror backup. And a bunch of Firewire 800 drives for storing all the video.
Does anyone know if the firewire 800 read/write problems I remember reading about in the first G5's was ever fixed?

EDIThmmm.. Also just saw somewhere that you can't do a striped RAID as your boot disk using OSX software RAID? I have a striped raid as my boot drive in my current Quiksilver using a PCI card, and I like the speed.
Anyone know if I will be able to stripe my 2xSATA Raptors into a boot drive?

Thinine · Nov 2, 2005, 02:36 PM

Yes.

SciFrog · Nov 2, 2005, 04:55 PM

"the boot drive will be 2x74GB Raptors in a RAID, with a 160GB firewire as a mirror backup"

What kind of RAID config is that?
Mirror as in RAID 1 mirror, or as in daily backups?

edddeduck · Nov 3, 2005, 06:27 AM

Originally Posted by SciFrog

"the boot drive will be 2x74GB Raptors in a RAID, with a 160GB firewire as a mirror backup"

What kind of RAID config is that?
Mirror as in RAID 1 mirror, or as in daily backups?

I think it is almost a RAID 1+0 configuration but unlike most RAID 1+0 configs I have seen in books, one side is running on two disks where the other is contains on one drive which is equal to the size of the other two drives when in RAID 0 mode.

So if it is a RAID config I would guess it is a RAID 1+0 but as my experience of RAID is not very deep I could very likely be wrong.

SciFrog · Nov 3, 2005, 08:57 AM

You do this with Disk Utility or some other software/hardware RAID?

CIA · Nov 3, 2005, 02:26 PM

Sorry, just to clear things up. In my Quicksilver I currently use 2x WD120SE drives using a Acard PCI ata-133 Raid card to stripe the drives in hardware. I don't really have a smooth backup with this now, but any critical data I have I do manually backup to another drive. (5 drives in the machine, one over the DVD-R)
What I planned to do with the quad is stripe 2 Raptors together internal using MacOSX RAID utility in Disk Utility. Then use a slow firewire 160 GB external drive to create a mirror backup of my boot drive if things go bad on the raptors. I am reading now that, (again, limited research on the topic) you can not boot from a striped RAID created with Disk Utility. Which kinda makes sense, as the OS would need to initialize the RAID prior to booting. I hope I can do this, but I may need to seek other options. Yes, the 160 external is larger then I need for backups, but I would partition it to the right size, or slightly larger, and use the little bit of spare space for scratch disks or something...
So if I go with a PCI Express SATA card, I might just scrap the external FW800 raid I was going to build for video storage and use SATA drives externally instead. Any Mac compat. PCI-E SATA cards yet? As my ship date gets closer I will start researching this more... Since I added the 7800 I probably won't see my machine untill late Dec.

SciFrog · 05:56 PM

I have an internal bootable RAID 1 in my MDD created with Disk Utility, you should be fine with a G5.

What I am questioning is your ability to do a fast RAID 0 with the Raptors, and to mirror it (RAID) to a slow drive. I think you will loose the speed advantage. Batch/scheduled backup is a different story.

CIA · Nov 3, 2005, 04:45 PM

I would like a striped RAID (raid 0) internally, with sched. backups to the external using CCC or something similar to clone the boot drive for recovery. No RAID 1 at all.
Sorry for the confusion, and this thread is waaaay of topic now 8-)
(at least I'm getting the answers I need tho, thanks everyone!)

SciFrog · Nov 3, 2005, 06:01 PM

Sorry for throwing you off topic, but we are clear now. You can use CCC to clone, Apple's own backup is also fast now.

For your original question, look here:
http://www.barefeats.com/dc20.html

Good luck.

CIA · Nov 3, 2005, 10:15 PM

Good source, thanks for the link.