Posted 12/15/03 by Rob-ART Morgan, mad scientist
Updated 12/17/03 with Photoshop results

After 4 months of begging, Xicomputer finally let me test a Dual 2GHz Opteron system. There's been a lot of interest from readers regarding the Opteron since it's the only other 64 bit desktop computer besides the G5. Since they both are clocked at 2GHz, I thought it would make an interesting article.

Below are the results, at long last, including the lower rated Dual and Single G5 systems. On this first page, we have CPU crunch tests. On the second page, we have 3D Graphics stress tests.

 

 

 

 

ANALYSIS

The Power Mac G5 2.0 MP beat the Opteron 2.0 MP at everything but (SURPRISE!) Photoshop*.

You should read some of the angry email I'm getting questioning my methods and motives. Seeing how we're the only web site in the world that has begged for months, driven for miles, and worked for hours to test both the Opteron and G5 as carefully and as fairly as possible, you'd think they could cut us a little slack.

WHAT ABOUT 3D GRAPHICS? SEE PAGE TWO for those results.

CONFIGURATION NOTES

The Dual Opteron was running Windows XP Professional, not Windows XP 64 bit edition... which is officially avaialable only for the Itanium. Several of you pointed out to me that it's available in BETA form for the Dual Opteron, but...
... there is no Windows 64 drivers for the Radeon,
... and none of the software we used is optimized for Windows XT 64,
... so we decided to wait until the next round in February to test with it.

OS X isn't really a 64 bit OS... so I guess you could say we were fair.

I tried to get the two machines as close in hardware configuration as possible. Both had 2GB of DDR400 memory. Both had Dual 2GHz CPUs.

As you can see from PAGE TWO, we didn't do very well matching the graphics cards. But with the new 256MB Special Mac Edition of the Radeon 9800 Pro shipping soon, we may be able to provide a more fair comparision.

The hard drives were different. The G5/2.0MP booted from a Hitachi 7K250 (8MB buffer) Serial ATA drive. The Opteron booted from a WD2000JB (8MB buffer) Parallel ATA-100 drive. Since the tests I run are not disk intensive, matching the drives closely is not an important factor. Just to prove it, I booted the G5 with a WD1800JB (8MB buffer) Parallel ATA-100 drive (inside a FW800 box). The test results were virtually identical.

Xicomputer's Opteron case was taller than the G5. It had 6 bays for 3.5 inch storage devices (standard hard drives, floppy drives, zip drives) and 4 bays for 5.25 inch storage devices (optical drives) -- but those could also be used for 3.5 inch drives as well. Wouldn't it be nice to have room for 8 hard drives and 2 optical drives in a G5's desktop case? While the G5's case had 9 fans, the Opteron's case had 5 fans (two on the two CPUs, two in the PCI bay and one in the power supply). The Opteron case was surprisingly quiet but not as quiet as the G5 case.

ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS ON OPTERON:
MOTHERBOARD? Tyan S2885
MEMORY? 4 x 512MB DDR333 Registered ECC (2 in each channel)
DIRECT X VERSION? 9
VIRUS SOFTWARE? McAfee
PERFORMANCE OPTIONS?
"Adjust for Best Performance" checked
"Permanent Virtual Memory" not established

ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS ON THE G5:
PROCESSOR PERFORMANCE SETTING? "Highest"
PHOTOSHOP G5 PLUG-IN INSTALLED? Yes
WHY PHOTOSHOP 7 instead of CS? Version 7 is 17% faster.
G5 "AWARE" VERSION OF CINEBENCH 2003 USED? Yes
G5 OPTIMIZED PATCH TO UT2003 INSTALLED? Yes

This test page is just the first round between the G5 and Opteron. By next February, there's expected to be a Dual 2.4GHz version of both available... maybe with 64 bit OS on both... and we'll have test results right here.

PRICE COMPARISON: The G5 is $600+ cheaper when both configs match.

I got a quote from the Xicomputer website for the following:
Dual 2GHz Opteron (246)
512M of DDR333*
250GB SATA drive
Dual Channel SATA controller
Radeon 9800 Pro (128M)
No monitor
56K Modem V90HW
Onboard Gigabit Ethernet
Pioneer DVR-106 DVD+RW optical drive
Standard Sound Card
Standard Keyboard and Mouse
Windows XP Pro
Xi standard MTower case

The total came to $4057
I added third party IEEE 1394b card ($50) since the G5 comes with it built-in.
The total rose to $4107.

The quote from the Apple Store for Power Mac G5/2.0MP configured as close to the above as humanly possible:
The total came to $3424.

Several of you took issue with the price comparison, saying that you if you ordered the parts from the cheapest sources and built the Opteron yourself, you could get it for under $3000. I believe you. A do-it-yourself system is much cheaper. But there's no such thing as a build-your-own Power Mac. That's why we compared it to an Opteron from a "we build it for you and guarantee the whole thing" company like Xicomputer.

(* I would never leave either machine at 512MB but the cost for memory will be the same for both -- as long as you don't buy it from the Apple Store.)

 GO TO PAGE TWO for 3D graphics...

...or RETURN to Main BARE FEATS Index Page.

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