The Power of Four: A Review of the Apple Macintosh Quad Powermac

by Jim Frost
November 26, 2005

At this point a lot has been written about the technology involved in the Quad Powermac, so I'll not repeat it. This review is all about the user experience from the point of view of a digital photographer; what it does well, what it doesn't, and a few surprises here and there.

Prehistory

To provide some perspective on my viewpoint, I started with Macintosh computers with used Mac 512 in 1988, used primarily for terminal access to minicomputers (via 1200baud modem! Sweet!). In 1991 I obtained a used Mac SE. In 1995, when I finally had money to spend on a new machine, I had the choice between another Mac or a PC. If I bought the Mac I had to run MacOS, which while just fine for day-to-day work was not a very good software development machine nor was it particularly adept at Internet capabilities (working at an ISP it was all about networking). A PC, on the other hand, could run pretty much anything except MacOS, and that included several UNIX variants as well as the new and very interesting Windows NT. So I bought a PC. And there my Mac experience took a six-year hiatus.

All that changed in December 2001.

In late November I had just reinstalled Windows on my wife's Dell laptop, a 10-hour procedure I had to repeat about every three months, the period of time it took Windows 98SE to develop some inexplicable problem or another that was best corrected by simply wiping and starting over. I was irritated, and just a few weeks before had been playing with a co-worker's OS X laptop. It was a Mac, but it was also UNIX. Intriguing. I had been running Linux as my primary laptop OS for two years by that point, and thought that with UNIX underneath the new MacOS would probably be a very robust, maintainable machine. But UNIX tended to have a lot of quirks that only technologists like myself could love. Did Apple hide them well enough for my wife?

My wife had never used Macs and hadn't had any particular interest in doing so, so I blindsided her by buying her a Ti Powerbook for Christmas. (If you're going to force technology on your wife, it helps for it to be fashionable technology.) There were growing pains, both in that we had to find new applications and learn to use them and learn how to configure the machine and to work around a number of irritating, although not debilitating, bugs in OS X 10.1.

A few months into it, however, I knew it was a success. I had spent maybe an hour or two, total, on technical issues on the new Mac. The networking is as solid as anything out there, the GUI was easy to figure out, and we found replacement applications for everything she needed. Best of all, she happily downloaded and installed patches on her own. The only major work I've done on her machine in four years was to install the Jaguar and Panther releases; eventually she even installed Tiger herself. The experience was so positive that a year after she took the plunge I bought myself a 12” Powerbook.

Developing Dependence

That Powerbook slowly eased into just about all the tasks formerly performed on my overmuscled Athlon Windows XP box. It sprouted USB and Firewire peripherals until it looked like an alien octopus analogue. And when I took up digital photography seriously it became my main photography box – despite being just an 800MHz G4 and limited to only 640M memory, and having a vastly more powerful Athlon box just to the left on my desk.

By 2005 it was clear that the hardware was really not up to the tasks I was putting it to and I started looking at the possibility of a desktop. The original plan was to buy a basic Powermac, which would be roughly competitive with what I usually spend on a new PC and easily five times more powerful than the laptop. The expectation was that Capture One would run more interactively; I spend a lot of time in that application and, on the laptop, it's sloooooow.

The Upgrade

The budget-minded plan was derailed in October, just when I was ready to buy the machine. Apple came out with the new dual-core machines based on IBM's PowerPC 970MP chip and the old Dual was suddenly the Quad. The Quad was clearly overkill for my tasks and, generally, I prefer to buy one model behind the cutting edge because that tends to provide the best price/performance. Unfortunately for my wallet Apple also introduced a new software package, Aperture. Nobody knows how well Aperture works yet, as the product is currently projected to ship at about the end of the year, but from what I've seen of the UI it is a giant leap forward over Capture One not only providing the workflow enhancements that make Capture One so valuable but also much needed usability improvements and, most intriguing of all, new sorting, organization, and archival capabilities that I currently handle with bodged-together shell scripts. Aperture looks like a dream come true for photographers.

But with power comes responsibility. Apple was up front about the resources the software would take: A Lot. $700 differentiated a Dual from a Quad, but if anything would run Aperture at full speed it would be a Quad. Moreover with any luck the extra capability would extend the life of the machine well into the conversion of the Macintosh line over to Intel processors, a process which I expect to require a lot of software repurchase. I gritted my teeth, typed in my credit card number on Halloween, and was immediately disappointed with an estimated shipment date of November 30.

To make matters worse, shortly after placing the order I heard about the rumors that the Quad was delayed due to production problems with the liquid cooling mechanism and, for models with the high-end graphics cards, noise issues. Given previous delays with new machines most of us assumed this meant an indeterminate delivery date months in the future. But Apple surprised us all; the first Quads started to arrive around November 9 and mine shipped on the 17th, fully two weeks before Apple's original shipment prediction. It showed up on the 23rd, two days ago.

La Machine

Since even the basic Quad is a well-configured machine the only option I took was to boost its memory to 2GB. (Really, 512M on a machine like this is a laughable default.) Thus the machine we're talking about runs two PowerPC 970MP processors, has a 250GB 7200 SATA drive, a SuperDrive, the Nvidia GeForce 6600 video adapter and the aforementioned memory for an out-the-door price of $3,599 before tax. With that I bundled a 20” Cinema Display ($799).

The Quad showed up at my office but of course the 20” Cinema Display I'd ordered with it was at home, having been delivered three weeks prior. So my office mates and I did what engineers always do with new hardware: We disassembled it. Counted the 4 huge fans providing cooling to the CPUs, gawked at the radiator, checked out the 5th fan cooling the drives, spied the preponderance of heat sinks. Marveled at the details of design and construction. But you can read all about that in MacWorld.

With all that hardware in there we had to wonder: “How much power does this thing need, anyway?” That's a lot of fans. That's got to mean an expectation of lots of heat. And that means a lot of power. So I looked up the specification in the manual: It can draw up to 12 amps. That, unfortunately, is 2 amps more than my home office has on its circuit – and I already run two Windows PCs up there. But of course that's worst case, and my machine isn't even close to fully loaded. But it gave me pause to consider the possible folly of the purchase.

With the machine finally up in my home office I extricated the Powerbook from its many snakelike tethers and ran into my first problem: The Powerbook is networked via 802.11g. The Quad was to use ethernet. But all of the ports on my office hub were full and even if they weren't I didn't have a spare ethernet cable long enough to reach. Why I didn't think of that in advance I don't know, I had three weeks to ponder such things. To top it off, it was 8pm the day before Thanksgiving and family had just arrived; it would be a day and a half before I'd be able to get down to Staples for a new network hub and cables.

So I did what any excited geek would do: I stole the network connection from the printer. I can (and did) live without the laser printer for a couple of days.

Then was the moment of truth: Would it pop the circuit breaker? If it did, I'd have to hire an electrician to run additional power to the office – not only expensive, but a big delay.

(Click) The lights dimmed. (Bong) The Quad spoke. The breaker held. The masses rejoiced.

In anticipation of the large power requirements of the Quad I had previously purchased an APC XS-1200 UPS system. The UPS monitor claims that the Quad, with the Cinema display and a pair of external Lacie drives, runs at about 30% of capacity. That makes it around 350 watts or 3 amps. Well within the available power budget and, actually, not at all unlike the power usage of the Athlon PC.

The Rubber Hits The Road

Disaster avoided I spent almost all of the last two days (aside from breaks to stuff myself with turkey and fixings) assembling, testing, and working with the machine. Some of what I found surprised me, and some outright contradicted other reviews I had read while waiting for the machine to show up. So here's where we get into the details you waded through so much text to read.

I'm going to review all of the parts of the machine I have worked with, regardless of whether or not they are specific to the Quad. They all impact the overall experience, and value, of the machine. Starting from the outside and working in....

Over the last several years I have been working primarily with Samsung LCD monitors which were inexpensive yet had decent color registration. Many of the photographers I know refuse to use LCD monitors because CRTs still provide the best color and contrast, but CRTs lack clarity and have significant color drift not only as they age but even as they heat up within a single use. Given the stability of LCD color, the compactness of the displays, and their low power requirements I really don't miss CRTs very much.

I could have continued to use the same Samsung I've been hooking up to my Powerbook for the last two years but since I was already spending a lot of money I thought I'd at least get a larger monitor. Apple's Cinema displays are generally highly regarded so I selected a 20" -- a compromise between "larger" and "affordable."

One of the first things I do with any new monitor is to calibrate it. Since I principally use my Macs for photography it's important for the colors to be accurate. This is a snap with the Spyder2PRO tool from ColorVision; dangle it over the display, run the program, and in 10 minutes or so it's about as good as it's going to get.

When the display first arrived I had run some visual tests using Apple's background images. The monitor was dazzlingly gorgeous, especially in its display of greens. But none of the sample images have people in them so I was unable to check skin tones. And indeed it was in such images where things weren't so great before tuning. Skin tones were washed out, a bit bright and flat. But after tuning they were rich and subtle. If you have a Cinema display you owe it to yourself to buy or borrow a calibration tool; straight from Apple the devices do not show off their full capability.

The back of the Cinema display has a couple of Firewire and USB ports. They're kind of odd in that they hang there off the bottom of the display. If you were going to put ports on the thing, I'd think they should have been positioned in the base. They work, but the positioning is less useful than it could be – particularly if you put the monitor up on a stand. I tried them but eventually opted to simply reuse the hubs I had been using with the laptop. Since the Cinema Display's cable bundles DVI, Firewire, USB, and power you end up with dangling USB and Firewire connectors if you choose not to use them; what seems like a nice piece of organization ends up being not so neat.

Overall the Cinema display is very, very nice; nice enough to justify its high price tag in my opinion. Other than the odd placement of the aforementioned ports my only real complaint about the Cinema display is that the adjustment buttons on the lower right side are extremely sensitive. I regularly affect brightness, or bring up the “shut down your machine” dialog, just trying to adjust the angle of the display. Either the buttons should be moved to a less obtrusive place or they should be desensitized. (They can be disabled in the control panel.)

On to the keyboard. I'm not a huge fan of Apple's keyboards, not since they went with those squishy things with the Mac SE. The 512 keyboard sounded cheap and hollow but had excellent tactile response, the best of any Apple since in my opinion. You just had to ignore the gunfire sound of rapid typing. Putting the keys down inside a plastic tray in today's keyboard sure looks cool but it ensures that the device will trap all kinds of junk and be difficult to clean. Despite the issues the feel is adequate to good and key spacing is excellent. I've lived with far worse.

The Quad comes with Apple's new Mighty Mouse. I confess to hating mice, employing trackballs and other input devices instead. My wife got the new mouse; I never even tried it.

So much for the peripherals, how is the machine?

Apple has the nicest machine upgrade procedure on the planet. When you boot a new machine, as part of the set-up procedure, it allows you to connect an old Mac to the new one and copy its applications and settings. It took about a half hour to copy everything from the old laptop (incidentally, the time estimate for the process is utterly unreliable) and the new machine came up; a supersized, League-of-Justice class copy of my old desktop.

Now down to business.

First I had to catch up on email, and that meant testing Thunderbird. It was snappier than before, but it just worked. No surprises. The same was true of Firefox, with a caveat I'll mention shortly. I installed the Photoshop CS2 upgrade and fired it up; it starts much, much faster than on the laptop – but it's still irritating to wait for all the plug-ins to load.

On the laptop there were always some pages that will bring Firefox almost to a halt. I have long presumed it was all the Flash advertising we run into these days colliding with the limited CPU performance of the older laptop. But while reading a longish news article in the Quad I found Firefox to be very unresponsive in scrolling. There's no way a couple of Flash advertisements were doing that. This bore some detective work, so I fired up Activity Monitor and was surprised to see that during the pauses the CPU time spent in the system (as opposed to the application itself) went through the roof – for seconds at a time. That is, as they say, very unusual. So I used ktrace to try to see what it was doing and came up empty; other than a handful of ppc_gettimeofday() calls it doesn't do much at all.

My suspicion is that Firefox is re-rendering the entire page every time you scroll it. If the page has a lot of text that means a lot of text rendering and a whole lot of font smoothing. I can't prove it, though.

So far, other than the Firefox glitch, you could barely even see the machine working in the Activity Monitor. But the real test was about to begin: RAW image conversion using Capture One. This process brought the old laptop to its knees; my normal work procedure was to disable background processing, do basic corrections on a set of images, and set the machine to do conversions overnight. On the laptop it took about five minutes per RAW frame and using the machine for anything else during the process was painful.

Capture One on the Quad was like a breath of fresh air. It comes up in a few seconds and thumbnails display quickly (although still not instantaneously!). Zooming in and out is smooth. Curve manipulation is very interactive. Nice, although it always did those things well enough on the laptop. So I selected an image to convert and started the timer.

Nine seconds.

It takes nine seconds to convert a 6MB RAW frame to 16-bit TIFF. Watching the process with Activity Monitor indicates that it isn't even pushing the CPUs at full capability; they all show about 40% idle. Since the process is fully CPU oriented, or should be, I surmise that Capture One has been tuned to operate most efficiently on two processors but I'd have to run some tests on a Dual to be sure (maybe it's an artifact of cache misses). In any case the improvement in usability of Capture One from the laptop to the Quad cannot be overstated; it's night-and-day. If you use Capture One you will really like using it on a Quad. It will improve my turnaround time by about a factor of ten. And that, as they say, is money to be made. (Of course those of you using more modern hardware won't notice such a difference.)

The next step in handling a photograph is Photoshop. It has to be said that for all the people who claim that they need more and more power for Photoshop I have had very little trouble using it on a grossly underpowered laptop. Aside from really CPU-intensive tasks like noise reduction using Neat Image, and a total inability to use my Wacom tablet, I found Photoshop to be highly interactive. I suspect that if you make heavy use of layers that would not be the case, but for typical photographer's work like retouching, cropping, rotating, and what have you the laptop worked just fine.

As such I didn't really expect to be wowed by the speed on the Quad. And, in fact, I wasn't. Certainly preview of operations like Gaussian Blur update much more in real-time than they did, but the difference is only one of degree. Activity Monitor backs up that opinion; I couldn't even make the machine breathe hard, much less sweat, doing anything I typically do in Photoshop. If Photoshop is your thing you most likely won't get much added value out of a Quad; I would suggest, instead, spending the money on a Dual and using the $700 you have left over on more memory. If there's any one thing Photoshop wants, it's memory.

Noise, Noise, Noise

The big fear with the Quad was that all those processors were going to pump out an ungodly amount of heat and the fans to get it out of there were going to be very loud. Reports like this one:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12671

on the Dual were not very promising, and several reviewers mentioned the “wave of heat” that comes from under the table when the Quad gets working.

Not having used the Dual I can't tell if the OSNews reviewer had a legitimate complaint or was simply hypersensitive but I can tell you this: In normal (as opposed to heavy) use the Quad is almost dead silent. Any noise it makes is totally drowned out by the other PCs in my office; I had to hold my hand in front of the machine and feel the air being drawn in to even realize the fans were running.

The liquid cooling system appears to be quite effective, allowing the fans to turn very slowly in normal operation and thereby keeping the noise level quite low. I suspect in an isolated room I would be able to hear it but in a typical office situation it's an unusually quiet machine.

To see what the machine is like under heavy use I fired up Capture One again, configured it to produce both 16-bit TIFF and HQ JPEG images, and set it to burn through about 90 frames – a process that ought to keep the Quad working steadily for a half hour or so. The intent was to drive all four CPUs hard enough to generate enough heat to kick the cooling system into high gear.

It did. Or, at least, it kicked it into a middle gear. At about two and a half minutes the CPU cooling fans increased their speed and the exhaust coming out the back of the machine had warmed noticeably. How was the noise? Rather than being nearly silent it was a bit of a whir. Not a whoosh, and certainly not a jet exhaust as I've heard other reviewers proclaim. I put my ear directly on the case; the fans were clearly audible, but not loud, and no air movement could be heard at all. Lying under the desk with my head near the exhaust I could feel the heat (although I wouldn't classify it as "waves of heat" as did one of the reviews I found) but the fan noise was still just a whir.

But as previously mentioned Capture One won't drive all of the CPUs at 100%. Running Photoshop large-radius Gaussian Blurs while Capture One chugs away does, though. Still, after several minutes of driving all four CPUs at 100%, I saw no increase in either fan rate or noise.

I wouldn't call this the last word on the issue; I never drove the display hard, and I suspect that rendering movies would push the CPUs even harder, and my office is comfortably cool this time of year. Still, until Aperture shows up that's a fair measure of pushing the machine as hard as you're going to for photographic tasks – and it kept its cool (so to speak). I don't disbelieve MacWorld when it says the noise from the fans can get "pretty intense," but I didn't see (or rather hear) it.

Update: (12/04/2005) Since writing this originally I have had a lot more experience with the machine. I turned off all other machines in my office to create a quiet environment. Under intensive computing tasks (such as rendering in Aperture or high-resolution video) the cooling system is quite noticable in such an environment although never exceeds average Intel PC noise levels and, indeed, is considerably quieter than one of my louder PCs.

But the cooling system is not all there is to consider when it comes to noise. Since I have spent a lot of time installing software on the new machine I have been using the optical drive quite a bit. And when that spins it sounds like a jet plane. It is, in fact, one of the loudest such drives I have ever heard, easily swamping the noise from the other PCs in the room.

The optical drive is mounted right inside the perforated front panel of the machine. There is essentially no noise baffling at all between the drive and the outside world; when the drive makes noise, you hear it. And it makes a lot of noise.

If what you use the drive for is installing new software and burning the occasional CD or DVD then this won't be an issue. But if you use it constantly, or if you think you're going to use it to play DVDs, it is obtrusive. Consider buying an external device; I have an external Sony DVD burner that makes far less noise by comparison. I had planned to retire it, but now I don't think I will.

Update: (12/04/2005) Watching the Aperture video confirmed that the drive is distractingly loud for video playback.

Another complaint about the optical drive is the way it is mounted. In order to present a clean look from the front Apple has mounted the drive behind a sliding plate. When the drive door opens the plate drops out of the way. Unfortunately the extra hardware pushes the drive back into the machine by perhaps a half inch; enough, it turns out, that the disc platter cannot clear the face of the machine. In order to insert a new disc you have to hook it in under the top edge of the slot. It would have been just as clean looking, and much more usable, if Apple had used the same style of flush-mounted drives as it does in its laptops. If that had been done it would also solve another irritation: The fact that the only way to open the drive door to insert a CD or DVD is to use the “media access” button on the keyboard. I almost always forget to do that when I'm holding a disc in my hand and end up grumbling as I stab for the key. Perhaps I will grow accustomed to this change in behavior but it seems to me as if they sacrificed ergonomics for fashion and I don't like it.

Getting back to noise issues, the OSNews reviewer also took Apple to task for their choice of a cheap, noisy hard drive. While I concur that the drives are not especially high quality, they're about par for the course for OEM equipment and more or less what I would normally buy. Unless the drives develop an early death issue I don't see any point about harping on their quality. They are certainly plenty quick and not especially noisy, even though (as with the optical drive) there is little in the way of baffling between the drive and the outside world. Drive placement, however, helps mitigate noise issues in this case: Drives are at the back of the machine. If you put the machine under a table or desk it will mute the noise somewhat. In any case I did not consider the drives to be obtrusively noisy.

Conclusions

Although I only have a few days of use of the machine under my belt it's clear that it will make a world of difference in my photo processing workflow simply as a result of speeding up RAW frame conversion. Despite the huge step up in performance between my old 12" Powerbook and the Quad there was not a huge change in the apparent performance of many applications, including the venerable Photoshop. With the unexpected exception of the optical drive my fears of high noise levels were completely unfounded. It's a solid, fast, and surprisingly quiet machine.

Now it's back to work while I wait for Aperture to show up.
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