It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side. Of course, given its 64-bit G5 processors, fast frontside bus, 2GB of SDRAM and top-of-the-line (at least from Apple) ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, it should. Apple, since the G5's introduction in June, has touted the new chip's processing power in numerous comparisons with Pentium 4 machines, and rightfully so. It'll pretty much hand every other computer its proverbial hat and keep on crunching data without breaking a sweat.
But what counts most are real world tests and numbers. The first number of note is the price: All this speed will set you back $4,198 at the Apple Store -- unless you buy the basic dual-processor model and add your own RAM from a third-party vendor. (Word to the wise: Get your RAM elsewhere, it's almost always cheaper than what Apple charges.) You'll find more information about the G5's basics in Part 1 of this review (see story). With an eye toward giving would-be users a sense for how the dual 2-GHz stacks up, I ran the newbie through some very basic tests and comparisons with two other recent Apple models: Last year's dual 1.25-GHz Power Mac G4 with 1GB of RAM (and 2MB of Level 3 cache memory per processor) and a first-generation 17-in. PowerBook, with a 1-GHz G4 chip and 1GB of RAM. Both were top-of-the-line Apple products when they were released.
News source: Computer World
