Eug
Lifer
- Mar 11, 2000
- 24,048
- 1,679
- 126
IMO the Alienware cases look like ricer cars. ie. Tacky. Plus the interior design seems nowhere as nice as the G5 case. Despite the 9 fans, the attendees at the conference say the machine is very quiet. The beef I have with the G5 case though is the single optical drive bay.
OS X includes its underlying Unix Darwin backbone, and you can run Linux on it too (Yellow Dog) . In fact, that's one of the main reasons the *nix geeks like OS X so much. The beauty of it is you can completely ignore the Unix backbone of OS X but it's always there if you need it. I ignore it, because I know essentially nothing about Unix. The only Unix program I run in the terminal is top. BTW, I installed Linux (Redhat 6) on my PC, and that was a painful experience for this n00b let me tell you. Anyways, with OS X, you can run *nix apps and mainstream OS X apps at the same time. eg. GIMP and Photoshop running side by side.
Yes they do. I don't know much about it, but I don't think it's been ported to OS X. I'm guessing that IBM may have used this optimized compiler on Linux to get their SPEC scores of 937 Int and 1051 FP on a single 1.8 GHz G5, which BTW is significantly higher than what Apple gets on OS X with GCC 3.3 and a faster (single) 2.0 GHz CPU. Apple gets 800 and 840 respectively for the 2 Gigger.
People are now reporting 375+ fps for timedemo1 benches @ 1024x768 max settings with the G5 2 GHz dual and Radeon 9800 Pro. People are also reporting gameplay in the 70s-80s in UT2003 @ 1920x1200. :Q Dunno what settings or maps though for UT2003.
Actually though, I really don't care about the Quake III scores, since my Celeron 1.4 with Radeon 9100 plays Quake pretty well already. What impressed me was the Mathematica bakeoff. The dual G5 was literally twice as fast as the dual Xeon. Probably some of that is Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field (RDF®) at work, and part of that is due to bandwidth differences (1 GHz on G5, 533 MHz on Xeon), but it was very impressive nonetheless. BTW, Mathematica has more Windows customers than for Mac OS X. I dunno for sure, but I presume there is pretty good optimization for Mathematica on the PC side.
Come to think of it, I wonder how well Sim City 4 would do on a dual G5 2 GHz with 2 GB RAM and its superfast bus. Everyone says that Sim City 4 is often slow on the P4 due to bandwidth issues.
Yep. On Macs, a good 3D card makes a HUGE difference just for surfing and Word. Basically, I consider any OS X Mac without at least a 32 MB Radeon 7500 and a G3 800 (preferably G4 800) slow for even office-type app use. I am sooooo happy I have a GHz G4 with 64 MB Radeon 9000 in my laptop. The OS seems very responsive, even with dual screens. (A 16 MB Radeon would be quite slow with dual screens even with only just a few apps open - too much memory swapping on the graphics card or so I'm told.) In contrast, with a Windows XP PC, you can use a PIII 500 and ATI Rage 128 just fine. Back to the original thread though, a Geforce FX 5200 64 MB is fine for OS X though I must admit, even though I'm Canadian and don't like nVidia cards.
Screw the 9800 Pro... I'm not a hard core gamer - just play a little from time to time. I'd probably go for the 9600 Pro though. No wait, Doom III is coming out... Hmmm...By the way dual screens on a TiBook with DVI to the second screen is absolutely gorgeous. I don't think I've ever seen an x86 laptop with DVI out. I don't think I've ever seen an x86 laptop with a powered Firewire port either, which is important for my external Firewire laptop hard drive, and for my iPod. I can power both of them simultaneously off the same port too.
IE is one of the slowest browsers for the Mac. It's so slow that MS finally gave up and stopped developing for it, after Safari came out. Mozilla is fugly, but it is faster than IE. Camino is based on Mozilla and looks nicer. Safari (which just went gold last week) is gorgeous and blistering fast. I'd say it's the most beautiful browser EVER created. Ironically, even IE on the Mac actually looks nicer than IE on Windows, but unfortunately it's too bloated. Office on the Mac looks better than Office on Windows too strangely enough.
BTW, for Safari, Apple hired some big names in the browser design and programming world, and used Linux's (KDE) Konquerer as the base. Furthermore they resubmitted their improvements in the code back to KDE again. It's amazing how often the *nix thing pops up, isn't it?
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