PreviousMonday 25 October 2004, 2:11 AM
Super-Computer on a desk
This review will evolve as my experience with this Mac evolves. I am coming from a Dual 500 G4, and a PB G4 1.0GHz so the performance leap has been quite impressive. Having said that, I have been playing around with a dual 2.0 also at a friend#s place which is what finally got me to the point where I had to have my own.
Summary:
Basically, this is a Rev B PMG5, with liquid/radiator cooled dual 2.5 PPC970's (64-bit baby brothers of the IBM Power4 supercomputer chip), uses a 1100MHz system bus, 400MHz memory, and 150MB/s SATA for storage. It's anywhere between 10-25% faster than the Dual 2.0, depending on the app (which is already a fast machine), and about as quiet. It's packaged in what I believe is the best looking, best built, and best designed computer case ever made. Built like a tank, and functional all at once. Included is the CPU Box, a getting started with OS X Panther booklet, a small booklet on the CPU box and installing additional hardware, and warranty papers. You also get your keyboard and mouse (which I chose the Bluetooth). Not much else. With the Apple monitor, you'll get the power brick, and a 3-way cable to attach to the computer. The monitor also comes with a small booklet and a nice dust cloth.
Benchmarking:
Running X-Bench (which didn't do the best job of testing the OpenGL and graphics) the average score we got on the Dual 2.0 was 235, while the average on the dual 2.5 was 252, only about 7% more, but this shows where X-Bench needs updating. Testing with Photoshop using an identical file, we came up with 16% speed improvement (with the G5 plug-in). In FCP4 we rendered the same 100MB video file, and the 2.5 came in 21% faster, quite amazing. Subjectively however, the 2.5 didn't feel much faster than the 2.0 in so far as the non-CPU intensive tasks are concerned, MS Word, Finder, Safari etc...
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