Polaris20 said:
Dude, I like Macs (ask Elevate
) but that was valid in maybe '99, certainly not now.
Yeah, 2:1 is probably an unreasonable expectation. But CPU speed is inherently nonlinear. A 3.8 GHz Intel box won't be much faster than a 3 GHz Intel box because the CPU pipeline is so long it's unholy, so at some point everything else is so fast that the huge pipeline flush penalties start to be the driving factor in performance.
By contrast, a 2.7 GHz dual G5 is pretty close to 35% faster than a dual 2 GHz G5. So at the extremes... say a 4GHz Intel and a 2Ghz single G5, for some applications, the G5 might end up being faster. Hard to say without benchmarking a particular application.
As for whether a Dual G5 (starting at 2 GHz, IIRC) will be faster than a single 2 GHz PC... if there's any question about that in anyone's mind, that's just sad.
I would caution that you should consider that you'll have to get all new software, including those plug-ins, and that not all VST plug-ins are available on the Mac. You should go into it with your eyes open. Figure out what you use, figure out what's available, and make sure there are no surprises. (At least for effects, I've almost always found equivalent plug-ins available for anything interesting, though sometimes they were from different companies. Don't know about virtual instruments.)
That said, I suspect you'd be very happy with a G5. It's a seriously nice piece of hardware. I use a dual 2.0 myself, running MOTU Digital Performer. No regrets (other than maybe my choice of sound card...
).