This may be a redundant question (most of them are), but if you are a person who enjoys giving advice on the matter, your help is much appreciated.

Heyo,
I have been using an eMac 700 now, for a time, but my software has so out powered my rig, that I am looking into purchasing a G5. But from there, I do not know which of the G5 Towers would be the wisest to purchase. What I would like to do is pile up loads of soft synths in my sequencers, and never fear that my processor is gonna go on a coffee break.

I have heard that you can run a large numbers of plug-in’s on even the 1.8 G5, so, with that in mind, would there be a reason I should choose the 2.5 G5 tower instead?

The take no chances approach would dictate the 2.5, but would that be over kill? Is there anyone here who has run multiple instances of Reaktor or Tassman, or other mega hungry programs on the 1.8, and felt they would never need any more power than that? And is there a discernible difference in performance between the 1.8, the 2.0, and the 2.5 G5? Thanks for your help.

Blessings,
Damon

CPU power is not everything though it sure helps..
depends on your budget really..
I personally would make sure I have 2 hard drives one for the OS and one for apps and data files... and then load as much ram as I can into it. If you follow this approach alot of people with lower spec machines can do a huge amount.
there is alwasy a bottleneck somewhere.. I would think that a 1.8 G5 loaded as I suggested with the extra drive and large amount of ram would do better than a 2 oe 2.5ghz G5 with a single drive and 512megs RAM..
like I said it depends on where your system bottlenecks

This post has been edited by shaneblyth: Sat 4 Sep 2004, 05:34

THAT is a really good point! Thanks! That I had not considered. Learn something new every day. Seriously, that is really something to consider.

Blessings,
Damon

I spent alot of time lresearching this question and asked the most important order for upgrading..
CPU
RAM
Second hard drive..
I think the question was in the newbies section...

blessings to you too

Most people place their operating system and programs on one drive and use the second drive as a midia drive. Cpu makes a large difference in the number of plugins you can run but you also need lots of ram. Get the fastet computer you can afford and add more ram as you can afford it. IMO.

The drawback with the 1.8 is that it's max RAM is 4gb, where as the others are 8

well i think 4 gigs is one hell of a lot of ram isnt it ?
my 1 gig of ram on my g4 1.5 i am pretty happy with so i would of thought unless you are some full on huge studio setup (in which case you would get the highest spec everything) you would be fine.. I mean is anyone here go 4 gigs in their setup... most I have seen is 2...

Hi tunepoet,

I am using a G-5, 1.8 G Mono-processor with 2 Giga of Ram & a very fast second HD SATA for the audio (SATA150 36GB - 10000 WESTERN DIGITAL (8MB) [ WD360GD ] and use mostly Logic pro 6.4.2 with Reason 2.5.
I am very happy with this set-up and have done different mixes and some filmmusic on it. It runs great ( 2 Giga of Ram is enough)."The Space designer in Logic takes most of the processing power, but I have used more than 6 of them & more than 32 Audotracks for mixing ( Plus other oplugins)"
And if you run out of power it is possible to freeze some of the vitual instruments tracks in LogicPRO or record an audio track of some of the virtual instruments in any other application.

Of course if you can afford a dual 2.5 G Mac why hesitate, plug-Ins and porogrammes will become more and more complex.

So., have fun with it the G-5 is a great musicproduction machine.
Kind Regards
Durga

Very good point. People with little money should upgrade neither OS nor apps, if their setup does what they need. That's why I'm still on OS9 with a G3 ibook600 and 512M ram and protools for recording and working on small sessions with few plugins.

Well, the G5 imac 20" and just a tiny weeny little meg of ram would be soooooooo nice I'll still use the old ibook for recording though

The 64bit floor-top computer we built at school in 1968 would be a bit limited nowadays. I don't mean 64 bits in a byte - just 64 bits and that was it

Hi! I already bought a G5 Dual 1.8 because I think that is enough for making music, but pushed the ram to 512 and I took the 160 GB. I rather think the 2.5 is not worse the effect for making sound, it is good for multimedia like final cut. However you will decide, I love my G5 [FONT=Arial][SIZE=7][COLOR=blue]sfxmusic@lycosxxl.de