Well back to the original question. The Performance with the Quad G5 is pretty damned smooth. I got mine a few weeks ago and it's really great. As you'd expect.
Running Logic Pro 7 and at least 50 EXS instances with no problems at all. I have 4 gig of Ram in this machine. The only thing I wish I could do is get more Ram and have logic recognize it, but I'm told that It can only address upto 3.7 gig.
Overall performance. Everything is tweaked, the simplest things open and operate blindingly fast. In fact the only thing I feel that is being a drag on the system is the HD, which is a Western Digital. I believe that Maxtor acheives better read/write benchmarks, and so would be a good improvement to this system.
Over My G4 this thing is just awesome. It's sheer computational power is staggering. And suffice it to say that for my VSL needs a doubt very much that I will want another machine anytime soon. Perhaps just more Ram, A faster HD, and the VI cube to really test it's capabilities.
Hey, here's a thought, how about sending me the VI cube and I'll test it for you [[:D]] Let you know how it goes like!! (Well ... worth a try!) [[:D]]
The big question everyones asking is ... is it worh the price. Well I got it as a birthday present but it cost around 4,000 euros for my particular model .. and that was with a discount! It's hard for me to say anything bad about it as it performs like a F***ing Ferrari, but I would say that for all you people looking at new macs, that there is not a huge speed improvement over exsisting Dual 2.7 (Nornal Dual chips that is). The main improvements really is in the bus archiecture which does communicate better with the processors, and of course it can number crunch twice as much data in one cycle.
I'd still say get it if you can, if you run logic, and your like me ... IE unimpressed with the idea of having an Intel chip in your Mac,... this is an awesome machine for that purpose. But just be warned ... it doesn't operate at 10 ghz. Sorry guys .. it's still only 2.5 ... but it does do, as I say, twice as much as the nearest competing Mac.
It's worth noting that the inside of the machine has been reworked alot since the Dual 2.7 macs. The archiecture is now all PCI express .. instead of PCI-X, so older PCI audio cards will not fit!! But Wow .. it is soooooo quiet. I thought that the 2.7 system was quiet .. this thing you can barely hear at all.
It also includes 2 ethernet ports, an extra USB 2.0 port (So theres 3 on the back, one on the front, and two up on the keyboard). As well as the usual Optical in and out which is damned useful with my DAT machine.
So, there you go.