Gimpy Towers
I guess some people sort of expected me to rant about the new G5s. I tried to summon up some sort of a rant, but there's remarkably little to add from my older G5 squandered post.
The first thing that prolly comes to mind is *Yawn*.
I think I've entered into a more resigned mode as far as their towers are concerned. It's hard to work up any sort of passion either positively or negatively regarding these towers. They're really, really boring.
With this update they're reasonably solid machines from a generic performance standpoint for a few months. They're borderline respectable now, but just that. They are all duals, which is a good thing, even though the pricing is fully out of whack again between the models.
There just isn't really anything to get excited about in these, little has changed. If anything, most of the things I talked about have gotten worse, such as the video card situation.
These towers are the nail in the coffin for games on the mac. In their stock configuation they are so unpowered for anything that uses a GPU at this point as to be laughable for anything except Expose, and even then you're going to be chugging if you have a high-res screen because of the lack of VRAM.
If you are looking at bringing over any games to the mac that aren't 2D, almost nothing can really play your games. iMacs? Nope. Powerbook? Really, really pushing it. iBook? Laughable. Powermacs? Their $3k stock machines are shipping with a GPU that won't even play Halo well, let alone the blitz of newer games set to come out over the next 6months. The only people that can really play the games you're selling are those who are paying $2500-$4k for their machines. Considering the base is already smaller, you just don't have a lot of people to sell to.
One thing though: the liquid cooling.
Holy hell some of you are going on and on about this and getting just a little too excited about, well, nothing. It's amusing in the sense that since Apple touts it, certain mac people think it must be something uber cool. Apple sees you coming from a mile away, and thinks you're stupid as hell and will suck up whatever treat they give you. This is why people don't take anything a mac user says, as they have a reputation for just parrotating whatever Apple hands them.
The fact is that there was really nothing in this release to tout except the CPU speed bump and faster SuperDrives, after a fucking year, so Apple was scrounging for things to kinda sorta make it look like there might be something innovative here.
The "liquid cooling" Apple has on the high-end dual 2.5GHz towers are friggin' heat pipes. They're hyping HEAT PIPES and you're eating it up and posting it everywhere with exclamation points.
This is not the liquid cooling that people are used to when you see a modded out PC. And guess what, it's not the first time they've used them. They were used in the dual 1.42GHz machines, and have been used in various powerbooks and PC laptops for years.
But wait, people say, "Apple says the system software controls the flow of the coolant! So this is a controllable pump!". Wtf. It's controllable via fan. IE, Apple can have fans blow faster or slower on the heat pipe, which, if you know how a heat pipe works, cools the liquid and can cause it to flow faster or slower. Think of these things in terms of ocean water: cooler water sinks, warmer rises rises, so there is movement.
Now these may be a new type of microchannel heat pipe which have been talked about lately, and are much more efficient than traditional heat pipes. But if they were, I'm pretty damn sure Apple would be hyping that up.
These machines are a solid CPU increase in the midrange and high end, with the low end languashing and everything that surrounds the CPUs being uninspiring. They're shipping an 80gig hard drive in a $2,000 tower for christs' sake. These towers have respectable brains, but are gimpy when you look at the big performance picture.
They may see a jump in sales with people buying in who were waiting for a bump of some sort, or revision b, but that'll subside until they figure out who they are selling these two and what they want in their machines.
10.4 better be pretty damn amazing, or WWDC is going to be pretty damn boring. If 10.4 is just an "edition" release like 10.3, the wonderings about Apple distancing themselves from being a personal computer maker are going to become more and more pronounced.
Yawn.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJune 11, 2004, at 05:46 PM
Comments (13)
Posted by: Henry Maddocks at June 11, 2004 09:32 PM
What should they have added to impress you? I've just bought a Dell 650, their top of the range. It's cost way more than the G5 and is nowhere near as good.
Just curious.
Posted by: Mindflayer at June 12, 2004 12:05 AM
So, it looks like this is indeed a pump-cooled unit, and not just heatpipes:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=8300945231&m=9080959175&r=428005174631#428005174631
It is ridiculous what Apple slaps in the pro machines. We're not talking about boxes for people just cranking out Word docs at the office. We're talking audio and video work, and, yes, gamers. More RAM. More video speed.
That said, i want a Dual 2.5. OTOH, I have to wonder how fast IBM can ramp up. The Power5 is out there, XBOX 2 is coming, and Apple wants 3Ghz.
Posted by: Brandon Johnson at June 12, 2004 01:22 AM
Nope, looks like DB called it right. Looks like a heat pipe going by this picture from the site. There is only one person on Ars saying it is a pump. It looks like a fluid resevior with a fan atop it to cool the liquid and control its movement (could be wrong but that is what it looks like to me).
Posted by: Xirt at June 12, 2004 03:15 AM
I'd have them put a more powerful video card in, something like the ATI 6800 oor top ofthe range Nvidia card on the 2.5Ghz machines. Also, the HDD should be at least 120Gb - although i'd prefer 200Gb/250Gb drives anyway.
They're still skimping on memory as well, a machine as powerful as this should come with 1Gb of Ram as standard.
Apple make oddles of money up selling the configuration on the G5, as they do on all their machines on the Apple Store. However, when buying a machine from a retailer most people do not get the machine reconfigured - they just get what was in the box. This is a mistake.
When Dell advertise a crappy spec for a good price when you call them to order one they upsell everyone to more memory, hdd, etc. Apple can't do that to everyone - because their product is out on the shleves of thousands of stores that are beyond their control.
so, unless they beef up the standard spec on these machines there are going to be thousands more new mac users with under powered machines due to lack of hdd, ram and decent video cards for years to come.
Posted by: kreiggers at June 12, 2004 05:13 AM
The Halo thing is what really gets me. I have a two year old AMD based machine, not even top of the line then either, with a nothing-special graphics card which I think still might have 128Mb VRAM. It works great for games. Not maxed out on every setting but smooth, at a good resolution, most things set to medium - whatever. I just use it for some school work (PC required) and for games.
My life is on the mac. I bought a 1.8 dual G5, 1.5Gb, top ATI card and cinema display
Oh well, I suppose if the Mac was a viable gaming platform with the lovely cinema display, I'd get nothing done whatsoever. I'll just use the PC for my gaming, and buy the best video card around when half-life 2 comes out for less than the less-than impressive top-of-the-line mac card.
Posted by: kreiggers at June 12, 2004 05:17 AM
so what happened to the middle of my comment you ask? I don't know. After the line "My life is on the mac...yadda yadda yadda" it was supposed to read:
I bought Halo to show off the machine and cinema display loveliness, but the frame rates are unplayable, and not much better at lower resolutions. Then they're not even widescreen, and the whole thing still sucks. And thats the best (minus the 2.0GHz, now 2.5Ghz) apple has to offer gamers.
Posted by: Art1mus at June 12, 2004 09:10 AM
LAUGH PC's with Intel integrated graphics have better GPUs than the G5s. The 5200 Ultra is hard to buy off the shelf because it is so old, Apple isn't paying more than $20 for them, they sell for less than $50 boxed full retail!
Alienware is one of the most overpriced and expensive x86 makers (but they are good machines) and their $1600 machine has a 3GHz P4, x2 the RAM and a 9600XT STOCK. The G5s are duds. I don't mind a premium for what I am getting but this is ridiculous. Their $2600 machine comes with a card more powerful than you can get on the G5. And this is from a company that lets you choose all your colors and lighting! PC Shops selling no frills with lights and custom colors are much cheaper.
These are for prepress people only. Even that is up in the air as you said drunken batman because of VRAM. Large displays will not handle Quartz Extreme or Expose well with many windows.
I think you're wrong on the no pump though. It looks like a pump to me. If they were forced to move to liquid cooling I doubt passive heat pipes and radiant cooling would do it.
And I do look forward to an 8X Superdrive for my backups. That would be really nice.
Posted by: Mindflayer at June 12, 2004 01:48 PM
I agree - look at that schematic. There are nipples for a pump.
I built my AMD 2800+ with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and 1GB RAM for about US$1000. It runs games as well as Apple towers costing more than twice as much.
Now, some would argue that if you want to game, buy a console or a PC. I disagree. While I know that some of the poor performance is due to the fact that code has to be ported (excellent jobs most times), some of it IS architecture of the OS.
Posted by: Celsius at June 12, 2004 05:26 PM
These can't be pumps for maintenance. They are supposed to be sealed and require no user maintenance. What is Apple going to do when a part fails in large quantities in two years? Tends of thousands of G5 systems shipping back would be expensive, they aren't powerbooks.
You are right about the game problem though, but anyone saying to buy a console remember if it is underpowered for games it is underpowered for professional use. Anything doing 3D like Motion.
Posted by: J Macky at June 13, 2004 02:05 AM
The cooling system looks very similar to Hitachi and others water cooling systems:
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1036/index02.asp
These yes are just heat pipes with sometimes small pumps if necessary. I believe what you are pointing out is actually the resevior not the pump if there is one like you can see in other systems.
Apple has said that the problem with the 970FX is not the amount of heat (wattage went down) but the amount of heat that is concentrated in a small area, heat density, now that the chip is 90nm because the 970FX needs dramatic power in small areas of the chip when it turns on which may be fixed in another revision.
It may not need a constant cooling with a pump at all but just enough to give it a buffer so the chip does not burn out when it turns on. This would differ from a Prescott CPU which uses lots of watts and must be kept very cool.
Posted by: J Macky at June 13, 2004 02:08 AM
Forgot to add that I wonder how well these will sell. Many want a revision b before buying in so most of the bugs have been worked out. If there is a pump, how long is it rated for? These are the types of questions people will want to know. The high end feels like a revision A again which may hurt sales.
Posted by: TG at June 15, 2004 03:08 PM
I'd go with the "Rev. B" rationale. I think many shops that buy lots of Macs (often with over-priced upgrades, since they rationalize it with "one vendor for everything") have learned the hard way that first editions of much Apple hardware is glitch-riddled.
So all those who've needed new Apple boxes for awhile can now bite the bullet and get a Rev.B.
Ok... so, what would be un-boring? Care to go out on a limb?
Those are well considered comments, and largely I agree, but if 10.3 was an "edition" release (I thought it pretty snazzy myself), what *could* make it worth your while?