In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.
In fact, you have Apple's strength right there. Apple makes technology exciting (again). From cynical tech journo to everyone who is tired of the incessant march of technology, and the implied march of complexity, Apple manages to remind us all that technology doesn't necessarily need to be alienating - and it doesn't need to look like it was designed by some monkey with a chronic inability to understand the concepts of 'intuitive' or 'cool'.
On the other hand, this comes at a cost. The PC market has demonstrated beyond all reasonable reservation that it is price that is king.
Yet Apple not only continues to produce 'cool' PCs that are uncompetitively expensive, but with the G5 it harps on about performance, which is something that most people have given up caring about. This all places Apple very much in the 'luxury' or 'sports car' category of computing, which is not a great place to take market share, but it does allow Apple to keep the rest of the computing world on its toes by producing designs that manage to put shame to the best the rest of the industry have to offer.
And you could not hope to represent all of this better than with the new Power Mac G5. So, without further adieu, on to the review. Of course, I must make the usual disclaimer that I am a PC user - heck, the editor of a PC magazine - but I do promise to treat the G5 with the same impartiality that we treat all products. Just don't ask me to do the same of Apple and its marketing department.
Inside and out
Straight out of the box (which is still the best packaging in this industry - why doesn't anyone else package their stuff so simply and stylishly?) the G5 impresses. It weighs a tonne - or 17.8kg to be more precise, which probably has something to do with its all anodised aluminium construction. It's also, by an order of magnitude, the best designed PC case I have ever seen. A lot of thought has gone into every single element of its design, from the tool-free SATA hard drive bays with custom connectors ready to plug in, to the removable fan assembly to access RAM, to the clear access to all components.
Possibly the cleverest feature is the four discreet airflow zones, one for the power supply, one for the RAM and CPUs, one for the AGP and other cards, and one for the drives. Each has dynamic thermal sensing and variable speed fans, which makes the G5 both cool, and remarkably quiet. Nice. In fact, I'd love to dare any other PC manufacturers to design a cleverer case - although the cost factor would rule out most of the top 10 manufacturers. The only real down sides to the case are the compromise towards looks which results in sharp edges on the handles, and the decision to use screws to hold the expansion cards in as opposed to using a tool free option.
Spec wise, the G5 is second to none. It sports just about every new PC technology available, including PCI-X (which is the replacement to the aging PCI - see Tech Horizons, p24), dual channel DDR RAM, a 1GHz frontside bus, FireWire 400, Serial ATA, gigabit Ethernet, optional Bluetooth and 802.11g and optional Fibre Channel. Having said that, it's only the dual 2GHz model that sports all the bells and whistles. The 1.6GHz model comes with 64-bit PCI slots and a 800MHz bus - not that we were able to test one - so even while this or the 1.8GHz machine might end up being the best price/performance option, we can't make a judgement on it until we actually see one.
Beavering away under all that aluminium is a couple of G5 processors running at 2GHz each. The G5 is essentially a cut down IBM POWER4 chip, and is a pretty serious bit of 64-bit kit. For more information on it see Tech Horizons in issue 70.
Also inside our test unit was a whopping 2.5GB of dual channel DDR400 RAM, although we only used 1GB to test in order to keep a level playing field with the other systems. Another reason for keeping the RAM down is upgrading from the default 512MB to 2.5GB is going to add another $2,464 to your bill - or about half that much if you don't buy your RAM from Apple (although if you do, you can only use non-ECC and non-registered). The extra RAM does make a difference though, although more about that later.
The hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm 160GB unit, and the optical drive a Pioneer 106, which is a 4x DVD+/-R, 2.4x DVD+RW, 2x DVD-R. We tested both these drives last month, and both performed very well.
The 2GHz G5 comes with a RADEON 9600 PRO 64MB installed as default, which is a decent mid-range card, although gamers will need (not want) a RADEON 9800 PRO, which is an optional extra. This addition would make the G5 a very respectable gaming box - albeit one with a relatively limited selection of games.
Also, you'll need to buy the RADEON from Apple for an additional $561 as there is no Molex-type power connector if you wanted to pop your own into the AGP slot. OS X 10.2 also requires an 'Apple supplied' card to install.
The G5 also comes with the ubiquitous 'love-it-or-hate-it' Apple keyboard and mouse. I hate it. I still think Apple keyboards have the best action in the industry (and an '=' key on the number pad!), but these days I expect a keyboard with a few extra functions than the basic ones. And don't start me on the inanity of a one button mouse.
Ticking over
On to performance. I've already talked about Apple's deceptive marketing campaign, so let us never talk of that again. We ran the G5 up against the latest processors from AMD and Intel, and found that it is, indeed, fast. Especially when using software that has been optimised for it, such as Photoshop. However, it's not the fastest PC in the world. A statement of that nature is insane to make about any PC-class processor, as nothing is clearly fastest at everything in every environment.
In Photoshop unpatched the G5 was about on par with the other current CPUs, but with G5 optimisation it managed 17.6 percent faster, putting it clearly in the lead. We also found that when packing the 2.5GB of RAM supplied with the machine, the G5 managed a 86.6 percent improvement in Photoshop, indicating the G5 is very speedy if it only operates in RAM and doesn't have to swap to the hard drive through the HyperTransport bus.
We also ran Quake III: Arena, which is a very effective test of the CPU and memory subsystems, with the right settings. We ran at the lowest possible resolution of 320 x 240 to keep the fill rate of the graphics card out of the equation, and with high geometry set to get the floating point units of the CPU ticking over - and found that the G5 falls well short of the Athlon 64 FX-51 and Pentium 4 Extreme. This was also with Quake III set up to use both CPUs - without SMP enabled the scores were around 40 percent slower.
This leads us to conclude that the G5 is a truly awesome monster when software is properly utilising the G5 architecture and both processors - so things like Photoshop now, and Final Cut Pro in the not too distant future. In that case the G5 is easily comparable to the competition. On the other hand, there is not a great deal of optimised software that does take full advantage of the processor. Also, the G5 when optimised is currently competitive with the likes of the un-optimised