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PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Benchmarks

Friday July 2, 2004 5:41 pm PDT by Arnold Kim
One user provides some of the first benchmarks from Apple's newest top end PowerMac - the dual 2.5GHz model. While Apple introduced the dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 in early June it is not due to ship until late July.

The following Cinebench benchmarks were run on a Dual 2.5GHz PowerMac with the new GeForce 6800 Ultra video card (connected to two 30" Apple LCDs) at WWDC.

For reference, Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac/Radeon 9600 Pro benchmarks from Xlr8yourmac's overview are provided in parenthesis.

CINEBENCH 2003 v1
****************************************************
Processor : PowerMac G5
MHz : 2500
Number of CPUs : 2
Operating System : OS X 10.3.4
Graphics Card : GF 6800 Ultra DDL
Resolution : 2560x1600
Color Depth : millions
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 356 CB-CPU (Dual 2.0 = 219)
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 633 CB-CPU (Dual 2.0 = 401)

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.78 (Dual 2.0 = 1.83)

Shading (CINEMA 4D): 335 CB-GFX (Dual 2.0 = 266)
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 995 CB-GFX (Dual 2.0 = 661)
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1794 CB-GFX (Dual 2.0 = 1168)

OpenGL Speedup: 5.36 (Dual 2.0 = 4.40)


Aside from a 25% increase in processor speed, the new machine also houses a faster front-side bus (1.25GHz vs 1.0GHz) and improved video card.
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SFNE Freak
99 months ago
Looks like it performs noticably better!
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Grimace
99 months ago
yowsers - I want one now - and a 30" monitor!
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Don't panic
99 months ago
not bad: 50% increase in performance!
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arn
99 months ago
Usual caveats.... benchmarks measure very specific things, etc...

however... the rendering benchmarks are proportionally higher than expected from just the processor jump (25% processor speed bump vs 60% improvement in the single cpu rendering)
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swingerofbirch
99 months ago
wouldn't running the two 30" monitors slow down the computer, if only marginally?
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legion
99 months ago
I'd attributed most of the overall performance increases to the graphics card as cinebench offloads a lot of these tasks to the GPU and the GeForce6800 DDL is quite a bit faster than the previous.

As Arn's disclaimer before, cinebench isn't a great test to see processor performance as much as GPU+SystemBus+CPU.
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toughboy
99 months ago
did anyone realise that the systems have different graphic cards??

for that reason the benchmarks may not show a real difference..
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clr900
99 months ago
How did someone already get a dual 2.5 with a 6800 ultra, I thought they are not shipping until August? I plan on getting one too but didn't think that they are shipping right now.
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legion
99 months ago

wouldn't running the two 30" monitors slow down the computer, if only marginally?


No, all the work is done by the graphics card (plus, dual link cards can easily go higher than the resolution of the 30" monitors, so it still isn't at a taxable level)
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benoda
99 months ago
I wish the benchmark comparisons where more relevant. It's hard to discern what advantage the new video card gives over what the faster processor/bus provides.

I suppose all will be answered once they ship :)
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