powermac G5 to macbook pro?

Elliotjnewman · #1 June 18th, 2007, 05:08 AM

Hi all,

I have a G5 dual 2 ghz 2 gig Ram running Tiger, and I am thinking about changing over to a macbook pro as I am away from home quite a bit... I work in film visual effects and I go on set for photoshoots and my work always give me an underpowered dell with windows media viewer to organise and view hundreds of 17 megapixel image files!

I also use Maya and lots of Photoshop, the latter for home stuff too, I scan 500 mb files from my medium format film scanner, and even my G5 struggles to keep up with photoshop and vuewscan with these programs both having these huge files open.

So basically, what I would like to know is, what are the trade offs I have to take when moving from a desktop to a laptop? And what are the performance differences between my G5 and a new apple laptop (I was looking at the 2.4 15inch macbook pro). Will I see it struggle to scan and open these huge files? And what about the disk speed? If I get the 7200rpm hard drive will it run as fast as a desktop drive in my G5? I also would need to get an extrernal HD as I will need about 500gigs (250 x 2 for backup)

thanks for your help.

**fryke** · #2 June 18th, 2007, 07:08 AM

If you max the RAM out and work with Universal Binaries as software, the MBP should actually be quite a bit faster. Then again, newer software tends to still use more RAM per se, so even the maximum 3 GB might be strangling your work with the scans.

Notebook harddrives _are_ slower than their desktop counterparts. The rpm-number is only half the story. But you can of course use a fast external drive via FW800 for Photoshop scratch and for scanning.

Elliotjnewman · #3 June 18th, 2007, 07:35 AM

I thought you could goto 4GB with the new books?

Elliotjnewman · #4 June 18th, 2007, 07:40 AM

oh and what do you mean by working with universal binary software?

artov · #5 June 18th, 2007, 08:50 AM

Since you have G5 machine, you have old programs. You can run the old
programs in Intel CPUs in three ways:

1. using the Rosetta emulator, which runs the programs as if it is the PowerPC processor
2 running the programs on the Intel CPU, provided they are universal binary, i.e. there is code for both PowerPC and Intel cpus
3. buy the program's Intel version.

The first version is slowest, since each execution instruction is actually evaluated by the emulator. Ok, the third version is also slow but only because you have to order the new version and wait it to arrive.

Elliotjnewman · #6 June 18th, 2007, 09:37 AM

Ok thats good information thanks.

The programs I run at the moment on my PowerMac are Maya 6.5, Photoshop CS, and the latest vuescan.

There are a couple other smaller apps that I use but they arent a problem to upgrage, and those two - maya and photoshop are due an upgrade anyway so it makes sense just to run everything native under intel.

Its quite amazing that a laptop can outperform my G5! I guess the best thing to do is max out the ram to 4 gig, buy the additional ram from 3rd party? as its cheaper.

I think in around 2 months / toward the end of summer would be a good time to buy, if I sell the G5 I still think I can make about 600 UK onit, which will help towards the new laptop.

The other big advantage is boot camp, which I can use to run the 3D apps that dont exist yet on OSX such as mudbox, though, I would never browse with the windows boot

Thanks, anybody got some good links to benchmarks between powermacs and macbooks? I can only find laptop shootouts, not desktop - laptop shootouts.

E