Filed under: iMac
Testing the iMac G5 vs. Intel video

An enterprising person over at Digg decided to time starting up his own iMac G5 alongside the video that I pointed to earlier, and while he found the Core Duo iMac to be the fastest, he didn't have as much of a gap as the clearly ailing G5 in that video: "The difference in boot times is such that one gets impression that Intel chipped iMac blows the G5 away. Not so, I%u2019m afraid. Whatever the guys did with the G5 it slowed it down considerably. And Intel iMac is actually hardly any faster than G5. How come? Simple, I used stopwatch, that video and then my iMac."
Check it out


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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Robert Knight said 2:28PM on 1-17-2006
I noticed that too! My PowerMac G4 starts up faster than that guy's G5. Kind of embarassing, that guy put a video of his poor G5 on the net so everyone can see that he doesn't take care of his operating system.
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Threnody said 2:36PM on 1-17-2006
This makes sense. I think boot-time is when the processor is least important. It's mostly about moving data from disk to RAM, no?
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Daniel D said 2:57PM on 1-17-2006
what could he have done to make his mac sluggish like that?
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tim said 3:12PM on 1-17-2006
nobody has seemed to mention that before he 'rebooted' he had just removed 256mb of ram...
perhaps his system took so long to identify and update itself. there is no way he can compare a system that HAS been ready to a system that is GETTING ready.
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fra said 3:14PM on 1-17-2006
I booted around 1min 20secs THATS including my login and my wrong password enterance!
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fra said 3:23PM on 1-17-2006
#2
Take out ram, pulled the plug a few times during boot (the iMac might be doing a quick check to see if the hard drive is working ok)...hummm what else... done a huge update and installed a few apps that need a reboot (VPC, Office).
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Daniel D said 3:32PM on 1-17-2006
Whoa you mean that they slowed down the G5 on purpose?! Thats crazy talk I can see from what you said how possible it is but what would they achieve by fixing it like that. I would think they wanted a clean fight as well.
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Entica said 3:57PM on 1-17-2006
WHO THE F CARES! I don't get this at all. Please, do you really care if your mac boots 5 seconds faster? How often do you actually have to boot up your mac anyway and is 5 seconds of your life really going to kill you? All this attention lately to boot up time. Crazy.
I'd much rather see how much better photoshop performs and all the other tools I need to use to make a living.
Heck, I can't even remember the last time I needed to reboot my G5.
My worthless 2 cents.
E.
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mccrory said 4:44PM on 1-17-2006
E, people care because they simply don't like to wait for their Mac to boot. I know I don't, especially if there's a minute difference involved. Busy people like things to happen fast!
But this test really was screwed up... my PowerBook boots up much faster than the G5 did. Maybe they'd just installed 10.4.4 on the G5 and rebooted?
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Rob said 8:53AM on 1-18-2006
"people care because they simply don't like to wait for their Mac to boot"
WTF is the big deal on waiting? One minute once a month or so? Me, and every Mac user I know only use sleep, not power.
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Tucker said 11:25AM on 1-18-2006
Rob, E, sometimes you just need to reboot. I'm sure both of you have felt some twinge of annoyance at waiting for something SOMETIME. Chill out, sounds like you're the ones who have a problem.
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