G5 Imac?, How will it cope? Options

[bloodychoir]

Does anyone have any idea how the new imac might measure up speed and track capacity wise, using say Logic Express? Would it be a good or a bad decision to buy a g5 imac loaded up to the gills with ram and a 1.8, or a powermac g5? That's considering the fact you then have to buy display etc. with the PM.

[enygma]

Alright. I have had a chance to play around with my 17" 1.8GHz G5 iMac for about a week now. Regarding hardware noise and such. Generally, in idle, it creates very minimal noise. You can hear the noise from the fans mainly. The hard drive is barely audible even when it is loading files from it, which can also be a problem. There is no HDD LED anywhere on the system, so I can only tell if it is reading and writing to hard disk by listening closely. So basically, if something is moving slow or I have been waiting a while, I can't tell if the system froze up, or my hard drive is going nuts without listening to see if I can hear the clicking of the hard drive. The fans inside will speed up when processor or GPU intensive tasks are going on, and the fans do get loud when under load. I did a render in Maya which took about 2 minutes to render, and the fans were slowly accelerating the whole time of the render. The render wasn't long enough for me to tell if there is a peak to the noise or not. And at the moment, I have nothing to tell me what temp the CPU is running at to see if the processor would continue rising in temp when the fans peak. However, when the fans are running quickly, I can feel the heat dissipating from the slot in the back. Air intake is at the bottom of the system.

General OS useage, this G5 was my first time using OSX, or any Mac OS for that matter. In general, I can see why professionals choose the Mac for video editing, graphics, publication and music. It is just a very nice system in general to multitask with, even within the same application. I would find it hard to go back to Photoshop for Windows if I got used to playing around with Photoshop for Mac, and Final Cut Express works very nicely with Expose. My main beef with the OS is web browsing, and windows resizing. These two things are generally sluggish. At least on my system, but I also read an article where someone had the same complaints working on a Dual 2GHz G5. Scrolling in the web browser is slow, and web page rendering is twice as slow as IE for Windows, or Konqueror or Firefox on Linux. Even Firefox seems to be slow to scroll in OSX. Most applications that scroll that I have used seem very sluggish, and Windows resizing can be very sluggish as well.

All in all, it is a very nice system, and saves A LOT of space. I'll have to get a smaller desk now that I have replaced my PC...

I haven't tried it with any music applications other than Garage Band, and that is without a MIDI keyboard. So I can't really comment on my music experiences with it. Other than the fact I need some more instruments in Garage Band...