RIGHT TIME FOR THE RESULTS
The Intel Mac arrived today at lunch. It is a 17 inch 512mb dual core. Compare to my G5 with 512mb - i took out the additonal stick to make the tests fairer.
First impressions are the Intel machine boots a fraction faster than the G5, I would conservatively put it at around 5 seconds faster, however not as fast as shown on a video doing the rounds on the net but indeed it is faster.
The first test I applied to the machine was to open photoshop and see how long it took each machine to fully open it.
The G5 machine opened this program in around 25 seconds
The intel machine opened this program in around 11 seconds.
Ilife 06 was placed on both machines and run.
The G5 machine opened this program in around 18 seconds
The intel machine opened this program in around 06 seconds.
I decided to test the machine using illustrator and a brochure I had put together which was 56 pages long with some very high res images in it.
The G5 machine opened the file after 16 seconds, and the Intel machine did this in 5 seconds, however the Intel machine allowed me to grab and scroll the document with no delay whilst the G5 machine was a bit more jerky.
I enjoy watching quicktime movie trailers on my Imac and found that whilst I could watch hi- res trailers there. I ran a test on The Xmen 3 HD trailer. The G5 Imac played up to 720p with no slowdowns or problems at all. When going to the next level 1080p trailer the G5 had problems even with 1gb system ram installed, the sound played but lost synch with the video as a lag slowly crept in. The intel machine played the 1080p with 512mb without a single hitch, the playback was fluid and uninterrupted.
Back to photoshop, and Indesign CS2 I found that Intel machine was on a par with the G5 but weirdly in certain functions the intel machine would blow the G5 away, certain brush and effects when applied suing the Intel would speed through instantly, where as the G5 would be 3-10 seconds behind in some cases.
Office proved to be very interesting as in my tests there was no difference at all, the load times varied by a second or two but nothing massively, and these would change around each instance, the only program I found to have what i would consider a noticable effect was Word. When a word docuemtn laden with images was opened on the Intel machine it did so with no delay, in the past there had been a 1-5 second delay but i had attributed this to down to the hard drive. Could this be due to the original powerpoint presentation being created on a Pc who knows.
One thing that is for sure is that the Intel machine comes with some nicer packaging, the manual, remote and documents come in a sexy slide box which was a plastic bag affair with my G5.
I cannot say enough about Rossetta, its like omni-present. If it is there and working you certainly dont notice, I will be interested to see how some of my game slike Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 run on the machine but generally across the board the Intel is either the same or faster. When native universal versions of the core mac programs appear like Adobe CS3 and Office I think we will see a huge speed jump!
