My dad and I were talking about what we were going to do about new G5s. At first we were going to order new ones this by this weekend. As we thought about it more, these G5s are pretty expensive. And considering we won’t have Panther until the end of the year to take full advantage of the 64 bit chip, will my dual 1.25 G4 be faster? I also have to buy an external burner, since the thing has only *ONE* optical bay compared to two in my current tower. What about speed? How fast is this chip really? The tests they used to compare the G5 to the G4 were all things that would scream on the G5 (heavy math stuff i.e. Mathamatica). Will iChat be faster? Safari? Mail? The few games I have may not even work since they’re build for G4s. The only reason we would upgrade is because it would be a good time to do so. We’re taking the sit back and watch approach this time, we’re not going to get burnt. My dad even looked to see if we get a free upgrade to Panther and couldn’t find it anywhere, that worries me. For the money we’d spend for the new G5 for unproven performance and several downsides, I could upgrade to a 20″ LCD Wide-screen, which *would* be a clear upgrade. I was looking at graphics cards too. I was looking at upgrading from the value nVidia fx card to a Radeon 9800 but it costs 350 dollars (300 on the dual 2ghz system- it has a Radeon 9600). I was looking at upgrading because historically (other than the cube, which turned out to be a really good upgrade in the long run) I’ve taken the stock graphics card. Sure it’s great for the first few months where you can run the game at high everything and still never see sub 30 framerates, but then a next gen game comes out (like 2k3) and suddenly your computer chokes running it at Normal (The game hates outside levels on my computer card - other than Face3). And as I write this, I realize how little I care for games. Unless I can run it really well (like Wolfenstein) and never see frame lag, I don’t really care for it. UT2k3 is really nice looking and fun, but I can barely run that game at normal (I can’t run it on the cool outdoor levels and bots make it near uplayable). So if I even had a thought of getting a G5, it’d have to spend a few hundred dollars AND clutter up my desk even more with a CD burner, leaving me with NO space whatsoever. For me, I’m better off with what I have now than a new G5, maybe even the dual 2 ghz one. The loss of the 2nd optical bay is too much of a regression to me, I think I’ll pass until we have a *real* G5 with as many bays as Adam’s 500mhz MICRO ATX case (Smaller than the G5 case).
Updated for clarity
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