Apple's New Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5--How Fast Is It?--Part II.

*Using the stock ATI RADEON 9600 Pro and 9600 XT graphics cards.

With startup times below a minute and the few times that a Power Mac using Mac OS X actually needs a cold boot, the startup time is largely irrelevant these days. Still, the new PMG5 DP2.5 manages to cut a further 10 per cent off the startup time. Shutting down takes exactly (to the full second anyway) the same time.

The slow speed of launching applications was a sore point with early Mac OS X versions but now, for the most part, they launch in seconds. Even launching Classic Mode has dropped to less than 10 seconds, a nice 25 percent improvement for those who still occasionally need to use a Classic application.

We are pleasantly surprised at the 26 per cent increase in speed to copy a large folder with many (3600) files of varied sizes. Scrolling speed increased a marginal 7 per cent.

The time to encode our test CD track, Beethoven's 6th, as an MP3 file increased slightly but that may be due to the change in versions of iTunes from 4.5 to 4.7. We can't imagine that the PMG5 DP2.5 is actually slower than the DP2.0 at this task. Similarly, the time to export our test movie in iMovie improved only 5 percent but again there were several version changes between the two tests that may have affected the results. Unfortunately, our DP2.0 is in someone else's good hands so we can't repeat the tests with the newer application versions.

Finally, there was a nice improvement of 14 per cent in the frame rate of our test using the venerable 3D first person shooter Quake III Arena.

As we noted in Part I of our review, there aren't many significant hardware changes between the original Power Mac G5 DP 2.0GHz and the new DP 2.5GHz model. The major ones being the 25 per cent boost in CPU clock speed, along with the liquid cooling system, the two USB 2.0 ports, an increase from 4x to 8x for the SuperDrive and the upgrade of the video card from an ATI 9600 Pro to an ATI 9600 XT, mainly an increase in VRAM from 64 to 128 MB. The latter mainly allows faster speeds at higher resolutions but little improvement, if any, at the same resolution. The doubling of the DVD burning speed may be important to those who burn DVDs extensively.

The dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 is the fastest Mac on the planet and in some respects also the fastest PC desktop. If you really need speed, the dual 2.5 is measurably faster than the original crown holder. However, it runs hotter and the fans work a lot more than they did in our original dual 2GHz G5. It's not annoyingly loud most of the time but the dual 2.5's fans do rev up to high speed far more frequently when doing intensive video tasks than they did in its predecessor, a whisper-quiet machine virtually all of the time.

We look forward to testing our dual 2.5 GHz with a 30" Cinema Display and Nvidia GeForce 6800 DDL graphics card installed--coming very soon.

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