New iMac 17 " less powerful !

Nando,

The frontside bus is one-third the processor clock rate in all of the iMac G5s. This makes it 633Mhz in the new 17-inch iMac. You probably also gained a slight advantage if you used paired memory.

Nando-

The 17" iMac G5 that you purcased was the mid-grade "better" (the "good", "better", "best" product line that Apple usually follows) model. It had the screen of the "good" model, but the processor of the "best" model. You must have bought ur iMac G5 for $1499 instead of the new iMac G5's $1299 pricetag. Apple now selling a 17" model for $1299 with a 1.9 GHz G5 processor while the $1699 model has a 20" display with 2.1 GHz G5 processor. Take into account that the new iMacs also used DDR2 (dual channel and much faster) RAM than does the old revisions. This is a much welcome boost in preformance. I do believe this means that RAM must be installed in pairs. It's very high preformance RAM, and I'm sure that these new iMacs will outperform the iMacs of earlier revisions of the same pricetag and niche.

Ian

The specs are listed here. It's 633, not 533.

You are mistaken on the frontside bus. On the iMac site the specifications are.....

1.9 GHz 17-inch iMac- 1.9 GHZ PowerPC G5-633 MHz frontside bus

2.1GHz 20-inch iMac-2.1GHz PowerPC G5-700MHz MHz fronstide bus

Ian,

The RAM can not be installed in pairs. There is only one slot. It would appear the first 512MB is soldered to the board.

Steve

The differences is neglegable. Maybe when they used the new chip (we have never seen these clockspeeds in PowerMac G5s) they had to redisign the fronstide bus slightly. Maybe there was an issue regarding the bus speed. Who knows, its 34 MHz. 🙂

Thats a bit of a downer. The other revisions of the iMac G5 had 2 DIMM slots.

EDIT: There must be two slots, for the iMac can take a maximum of 2.5 GB, and .5 of them are what you said, soldered to the board, leaving the two slots empty 🙂

"There must be two slots, for the iMac can take a maximum of 2.5 GB, and .5 of them are what you said, soldered to the board, leaving the two slots empty."

Nope. The specs clearly say -

1x512MB, 1x2GB

when selecting the 2.5GB option.

They make 2GB chips?

Apple charges $1200 for the 2GB chip.

My iMac 17" was only a 1.8ghz.
So this one would be a slight improvement.

That's odd, i see where you're getting that but it says differently on the main page for it. http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html see? weird.