The New G5s
I haven't seen the new G5 towers since they officially started shipping, but I did get to play with some Dual 2.0GHz boxes at WWDC. Since the machines are shipping now, I suppose it's fair game for me to post my impressions.
First off, let me just say that I really don't like the new enclosure. It's metal, it's heavy and it's big. Those handles? Yeah, wear gloves if you're gonna lift this box - with the weight of the box and the sharper-than-G4-tower edges, they cut into your hands pretty fierce. I guess some people really like the new look of the G5 tower, but sadly, I am not a fan.
Speaking of fans, the G5s I played with are quieter than my DP 800 G4 -- most of the time. We ran Dungeon Siege on one, and it handled itself very well, comparable to equivalent PCs, IIRC. That was sweet to see. I also ran EverQuest on 2 different Macs. Here's where I should add a disclaimer: the OS we were using was a pre-release version of 10.2.7, so what I experienced may not be representative of the shipping boxes. When I ran EQ, it ran proportionally faster, which was nice. It also turned on what seemed like every single freakin' fan in the box. When those fans are all going, the G5 is significantly noisier than my QuickSilver to the point of being distracting. I'm not sure why EQ triggered this and DungeonSiege didn't. Maybe the shipping G5s don't have this problem. But if it happens that there are a number of apps (I'm thinking games here) that frequently trigger a Fan Blast, then I'm sure we'll be hearing about it from Mac users in all 4 corners of the globe soon.
Comments
Attach an iSight to it and you could have your own hovering spy cam. Well, a spy cam you could hear from 50 feet away, but hovering nonetheless.
Posted by: lyssa | August 29, 2003 05:59 AM
Brad, do developers get their hands on new Apple technology, or at least their specs, before hardware is released? I would assume so in order to check compatibility with existing or upcoming software releases...
Posted by: Jean-Luc Dinsdale | August 29, 2003 01:03 PM
It's very rare for us to get our hands on specs or hardware early. In the case of WWDC, Apple had a test lab with 20-30 G5 towers set up, but we didn't know beforehand, so we didn't plan as well as we could have. I would have brought in a Quake3-based game or MacMAME to test the G5 out if I had known for sure. We did get our hands on the force feedback stuff before it went into the OS, but that was mainly because it was something we as a company had been pushing hard to get for some time.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | August 29, 2003 04:29 PM