#Used mac g5 quad Pc#

I believe that was with 4GB memory and one hard disk. His power meter indicated a usage of up to 500 watts while booting, but that settled down to 180 watts at idle. This still made no sense, so I gave an old friend at Apple a call who plugged a Quad into a power meter. The answer came back that the Quad uses 1000 watts in a 4GB configuration. Knowing that it was unlikely to actually consume 1200 watts, I called Apple business sales, and the sales representative put me on hold to вЂњcheck with an engineerвЂќ on the power usage issue. The Quad is apparently liquid-cooled, a nifty feature that costs considerably extra in most PCs.

#Used mac g5 quad Pc#

Try finding a 1200 watt power supply at your local PC superstore-the maximum youвЂ™ll see advertised is usually 600 watts. Its specifications indicate power usage up to 1200 watts-a deal-killer for me in terms of the noise, heat and cost. The power cable is noticeably larger in diameter than the one for my PowerMac G5 dual 2.5GHz. One of my concerns about the PowerMac Quad (until today) was its power usage. Still, itвЂ™s like having 4 computers in one if youвЂ™re running several single-threaded programs at once. Unfortunately, it takes extra coding and testing to make a program вЂњthreadedвЂќ, and some developers donвЂ™t do that work. But plan on getting at least a 2-drive striped RAID array, because unless you can feed the QuadвЂ™s voracious appetite, the 4 cores will be underutilized.ДЄlso, programs that are single-threaded use just one core (equivalent), so the Quad wonвЂ™t be any faster than a single-core machine for such tasks. If youвЂ™ve put off buying a Quad because an Intel-based version may be coming, wait no longer-the G5 Quad is the first computer IвЂ™ve used that makes any normal task appear effortless. It is very difficult to make the Quad break a sweat-nothing we had on hand could blip CPU usage on all 4 cores for more than a moment. What a quiet, beautifully-built machine! No PC IвЂ™ve ever seen comes close to this combination of low noise and elegant design. Plan on getting 2GB for your laptop if you intend to run Aperture. But even that may not be enough if you want to run Photoshop or other programs at the same time. Given the massive memory requirements, laptop users shouldnвЂ™t even consider Aperture with less than 1.5GB of memory. Otherwise, the test is just benchmarking virtual memory system performance (the disk), and the results are meaningless in any setup that isnвЂ™t an exact match (in multiple ways). Any test that makes claims about ApertureвЂ™s processing speed is worthless unless it verifies there is adequate memory. I noticed that Aperture by itself was using about 800MB of real memory (mapped to about 1.2GB of virtual memory). Benchmarks using a large number of the same raw files would be needed to make a precise comparison to other machines and converters, but I have no doubt that Aperture would come out near the top of the heap, if not the very top. Aperture does use all 4 CPU cores fully, albeit very briefly, which must contribute to the fast performance. Compare that to the 7.2 seconds for converting a NEF on a dual 2.5GHz PowerMac using Nikon Capture (see Nikon Capture-Speed and Stability).

Without a doubt Aperture has the most attractive user interface (by far) every produced for a raw-file converter (though Adobe Lightroom, still in beta, might become a competitor in that regard).ДЄperture on the Quad is notably faster than anything IвЂ™ve seen before, roughly 2-3 seconds to convert a raw D2X NEF or 1DsMII CR2 to a 16-bit TIF (no specific timings were done). The results will become part of the Raw-file Converters article. Today I performed some raw conversions using Aperture 1.0.1 at a friendвЂ™s house, using a PowerMac G5 Quad with 4.5 GB of memory, and a single (non-RAID) drive.