Computer is G5 Dual 2.0 GHz 2GB RAM, with Final Cut Pro 6.
When rendering out of Final Cut Pro or compressing with Compressor, it seems very slow. Should I add more RAM? Or upgrade the video card? Or is there no way to speed up the rendering?
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A g5 dual never made a video card with onboard graphics or shared ram. The video card or the ram are not really the crucial elements at all here. Read the story of the guy in this thread who just spent a million bucks on a new super macpro tower. The key is a dedicated scratch disk to rendering time. this can be external or internal but you never want to have your scratch disk set to your boot drive.
http://forums.creativecow.
That's a pretty old system you have. You essentially have 3 options:
1. GRAPHICS CARD UPGRADE: Apple may have a G5 compatible graphics card available on their site, but it will likely be AGP, as I'm not sure if your PowerMac has a PCI-E slot. Those were available only on the Intel MacPro's, which came out in 2006. www.lowendmac.com has all the specs for every mac ever made, so you might want to check there, in case my memory is wrong.
2. You could upgrade the RAM, which would be VERY expensive should you order it from Apple. Besides, you won't really get that big an improvement given the price of RAM. A good rule of thumb, don't spend more than $200 (US, CAD, UK pounds, or Euros) for at least 4GB worth of modules. Pay any more, and you are better off going to option three:
3. Sell your mac and get a shiny new one. Your mac still has value, say about $500. That would put the price of a new base-model MacPro at around $2000, which you can just finance over a year or three.
Yeah, scratch disks help, but unless you're rendering in HD (or IMAX format, *shiver*) , I doubt you'll get the performance boost you're looking for. If you are rendering in HD, then you'll need a real skookum machine, especially if you are using it in a professional capacity. I'm talking about the high-end MacPro with 32GB RAM, an NVidia GTX 285 or Quadro, a FibreChannel/iSCSI card connected to a multi-terabyte array. And that's just for small projects. Larger projects will require a rendering farm, especially with fancy 3D effects thrown in. Not fun if you are just starting out, but awesome if your employer ponies up the cash!
Hope this helps.
Video card wise it depends on your g5. It will have either pci-x or pci-e slots. (late 2005 will be pci-e) In some ways, you might wish it was pci-x as there were few and pricey options for pci-e from Mac. You may need to look at a reflashed PC card to keep the price down. Also are we need to clarify. Are we talking composition/ rendering or compression. . Composition and real time effects are partially offloaded to the GPU but rendering is still partially cpu dependent. Compression is all CPU so only ram and scratch disks will help. Snow Leopard will resolve these issues. i would wait until it comes out if you upgrade the whole thing.
I run a quad 2.5 G% with a Quadro FX4500 8gb of ram. i also have a high speed 150 GB boot drive running at 10000 rpm. My scratch disks sit on a 7 times 75 gb raptors array connected to a cheapish Rocketraid 2320. I bought it because of the large performance gain that its gen brought.With the new MacPro line, even with 8 cores the performance equation won't really hit the buy notch until Snow leopard's Grand Central and open cl hits the ground.
Ya, i was beginning to fish around for that info. I just happened to remember the dual 2.0 was only made in pci-x or pci-e flavors. the 2,003 : a 2.0 GHz dual processor one - had three 100/133 MHz PCI-X slots and supported up to 8 GB of RAM. These were the first Macs to use SATA hard drives.
2005 Each model had dual processors, and speeds ranged from 2.0 GHz to 2.7 GHz(pci-e)
We also know no onboard video was ever offered on either machine nor was shared memory with the gpu part of either machine"s architecture but 2 gb ram is pretty minimal for FCP .
Why don't you use activity monitor and report out on cpu usage, mem usage, and swap file usage while rendering and/or compressing as this would also give valuable detail. Some screen shots of each tab while FCP is hammering would help a lot. Both machine had weak video cards standard so it would help to know if the machine had a higher performance vid card installed. Also look hard at this page: http://www.macintouch.com/
Both models of g5's showed very un-applesque reliability with some models reaching pretty horrendous failure rates. This trend seems to be continuing. I have a copy of the real hardware test dmg and an appalling high number of errors lead to cpu replacement and or board replacement. The price of either makes the machine not worth fixing. People are beginning to theorize that the new greener solder used in the boards is not standing up to g5 heat not to mention the power supply popping taking out the board when it goes.(or the coolant leaks) I would think real hard about much more than a compatible)non apple branded/priced ram upgrade. If you have a pc card laying around that could be re-flashed I might look at that but I could not imagine risking buying an apple Oem card at those prices particularly if you have the pci=e board. An external firewire 800 drive for a scratch disk could be re-usued as could an additional fats stata drive so that might be ok. bottom lime my quad just barely failed within the apple care so i got a new board and Ps but my dual 2.0 is beginning to show the signs of creeping memory controller death post apple care and, while it is working now, should shortly begin eating ram modules before dying completely. I have maybe a year at best from what I read in the forums. So beside the info requested by both of us I would trot the machine down to an Apple store and see if it passes the Apple tech hardware test before investing in it. Even then board micro cracks are a such that a failing board will often pass the tests even when beginning to show intermittently the classic symptoms of one or the other failures. Also do not upgrade to Leopard as this seems to anecdotally correlate for many death throe beginnings. Leopard seems to push the memory controller underwater faster than Tiger. Bottom lime be very careful about sinking money into a g5 as almost any serious problem makes it a throwaway. If you can nurse it along until Snow Leopard comes out, then sigh a great sigh of relief and sell it on ebay and buy a new Macpro. Finally, check the serial number of your machine here. http://www.apple.com/suppo
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by: IPKON_NetworksPosted on 2009-08-06 at 01:47:36ID: 25031177
You don't mention the graphics card you have and if it uses onboard or shared RAM.
Upgrading RAM will no doubt help a lot, but using a graphics card with high onboard RAM and GPU will probably make more of a difference. This will remove the processing off the CPU as well.
Hope this helps
Barny