Pros: Everything! Speed, cooling, Unix based OS on a desktop platform
Cons: price
The Bottom Line: If you are looking for a desktop without the worries of stability or viruses...the G5 is well worth the cost of removing all of the headaches of a PC
smijolovic's Full Review: Apple Power Mac G5 (M9031LL/A) Mac Desktop
As a system administrator and a storage engineer, I have seen just about every platform on the market. Every platform has it's purpose.....so you won't hear me bash any OS or system here. This is just a way to give users of all OSes and hardware architectures that may be interested in looking at the G5. All I can say is that if you are looking for a rock stable platform without having to worry about PC issues, the G5's performance is well worth the price.
Just to give you an idea of my Silicon addiction, I will give you a good idea of what I can compare the G5 to at home on a daily basis. My Sun Ultra 60 has (2) 450Mhz UltraSparc II processors with a gig of Ram running Solaris 9. It is my Sun Ray Server (2.0) for my Sun Ray 1. I also have a dual Opteron box I custom built with 2Gig of Ram running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server and serves as my Windows 2003 Exchange Enterprise Mail server.
Believe me....I know I have issues.
So, to my delight, I was able to buy a machine that I swore I would never sell, rebuild, revamp, etc. for at least three years. So I chose a G5 1.8 Ghz to fit that category.
Now to the details...and there are enough to make your head spin. I won't talk decimal points with numbers of performance....Apple.com will give you enough of those to make you sick. I will just explain the parts you care about. First, the G5 is built on the IBM 760 core, a very welcomed change to the Mac world. Motorola, kings of the G3 and the G4 processors, have officially been "replaced" in the desktop world. This IS a welcomed change...Motorola for way too long has suffocated this architecture with overpriced manufacturing costs and lackluster performance. Having Big Blue in the mix is the reason why I went with the G5...the flat out know die manufacturing, and the numbers of this 760 core are astounding...oh and by the way the cost of the processor actually has gone down. The other architecture increases have kept the overall price the same as former PowerMacs upon first release. The front side bus is 50% of the core speed on all three offerings, so for the 1.8 Ghz, you get yourself a 900 Mhz bus...not too shabby. DDR 400 memory (PC3200) is almost 4X higher than the PowerMac G4, and the new addition of the Serial ATA form factor surely help on the disk access (150Mhz). Finally PCI-X is fully integrated, and if you don't think that matters, a 133Mhz bus gives you 1066MBps of internal bandwidth.
Now for the asthetics....boy does the new G5 look cool! The aluminum silver case is amazing, and the air movement system in the box is second to none. Cooling "zones" allow certain channels to pass air directly through the box with no path interference, which allows the fans to spin slower (quieter) and keep the box nice and cool. It is one of those things that have us sys admins saying "man, where has this been all our lives".
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1750.00 Operating System: Macintosh Processor speed: over 1000 RAM: More than 256 Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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