26 replies to this topic

[Frost]

the Battle Cat, on 09 June 2017 - 06:13 PM, said:

I was so proud of my awesome new G4.

I think we all were. The G4s were when PowerMacs really got cool.

[Boland]

AussieMacGamer, on 09 June 2017 - 09:09 PM, said:

This iMac is a kinda funny machine now that we know a new Mac Pro is coming. Sure it's a great Pro Setup, but I feel like 90% of people who need a workstation would shoot for an equivalent Mac Pro were one available. Unless Apple offers incredible value on this verses their own new cinema display and new mac pro (which I actually feel might be likely, don't know why they've been doing such good value on these iMacs for the past few years and such popsnizzlety on their own displays), I can't see many reasons to buy the iMac with the disadvantages it brings long term.


I'm curious still as to wether or not the new iMac has desktop 5 series cards, or if they're m series again? They aren't branded so. And if that VR demo was anything to go by, it seems pretty on par with 480/580 performance. That's a pretty fantastic result for consumers IMO, much better value than the last iMac.

EDIT: some digging finds at least that these are branded Radeon Pro 580 vs the RX 580. I think they're different cards...


Also, In terms of pricing, you could buy the cheapest 5k iMac, and a VR dev kit, for only AU$50 more than the iMac with the 580 built in. Upgradable (and re-sellable) graphics from the get-go.

Which makes me wonder if Apple would be able to find a way to implement a two port solution to pipe thunderbolt video data back into the iMac and save on the performance hit from using the internal display? Surely they're working on some solution to this... Eitherway future is bright.

Mac Mini with eGPU would be great too!

It's a full/fat desktop 580 down clocked a bit to keep the thermals in check.
Still very good.

[Camper-Hunter]

Frost, on 09 June 2017 - 10:47 PM, said:

I think we all were. The G4s were when PowerMacs really got cool.

You've got to be kidding. It was the worst time in the PowerPC era. Motorola couldn't deliver on clock speeds, Apple even had to ship Macs with a 50 MHz lower clock speed than announced because of this. It took two years to finally break the 500 MHz barrier, so Apple had to resort to dual CPUs (but with Classic Mac OS, that was ill exploited at best). The only thing the G4 had over the G3 was Altivec (basically only useful for Photoshop and some other apps) and better floating point performance (only good for scientific apps). All this while Intel, with its Pentium 4, despite its flaws, was enjoying massive performance gains.

Cool PowerMacs, IMHO, were the G3 and G5.

[macdude22]

come on but the shiny as hell MDD. Nuff said.

I just upgraded the VRAM in my beige G3 a couple weeks ago. Works great. For uhhhhhhhhh unreal I guess is all I use that G3 for.

[the Battle Cat]

Camper-Hunter, on 10 June 2017 - 08:55 AM, said:

Cool PowerMacs, IMHO, were the G3 and G5.

I never had a G3, but I still have my G5 which you will have to pry from my cold dead paws.

[Spike]

Camper-Hunter, on 10 June 2017 - 08:55 AM, said:

You've got to be kidding. It was the worst time in the PowerPC era.

No, the G4's were awesome. My G4 MDD desktop with dual 1Ghz G4's was the last desktop I bought as their desktops since have been so terrible. I added a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics and SCSI raid card for incredible performance. Motorola and IBM delivered higher clock rate processors fine as we got lots of them at the company I worked for.

The G5's were the failure. IBM not able to get to the 3Ghz that Steve Jobs said it would in a year, as well as never getting a mobile version.

[Frost]

the Battle Cat, on 10 June 2017 - 01:01 PM, said:

I never had a G3, but I still have my G5 which you will have to pry from my cold dead paws.

My poor Quad G5 has to run at reduced CPU performance or it overheats now. Coolant overdue for a flush at 12 years I guess... I've got hose clamps, a hand vacuum pump, coolant, and some tubing on the way though. Going to try and play doctor on it soon when the hose arrives and I work up the nerve and do a flush and refill. Fortunately I have a second dual pump LCS incase I frak something up.