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Conclusion

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To Infinity ... and Beyond!

After a couple of weeks of living with my G5, I find it very difficult to work on the G4 any longer -- it just feels slow ... really slow. I realize that each generation of Macs gets quicker, but I tested each of the dual G4s when they came out, and none of them felt all that much faster than my G4 (otherwise, I probably would have upgraded sooner).The Dual G5 is an entirely new realm of Mac performance, and I'm not alone in that thought. Macworld (Benchmarks, Review), PC Magazine (Apple Power Mac G5: Neck-and-Neck with Intel PCs), and Infoworld (G5 Special Report) have all run reviews of these machines, praising their speed and features.

For those of you who think that these machines are overpriced, it's just not true -- equipping a Dell machine with similar specs will run at least what Apple is asking, if not more (when I tried it, I came out with a $4K-ish PowerMac and a $4.5K-ish Dell). And if you happen to have a spare $5.2million lying around, why not buy 1,100 Dual G5s, cluster them, and build yourself an economical top-five ranked (17.6 terraflops) supercomputer!

So what's with the lame Toy Story quote in the header? Simply that having this level of performance available (with 3.0ghz machines on the near horizon) will bring great benefits to Apple as the technology trickles down through the product line. No longer will Macs be "easy to use but somewhat slow." Instead, you'll be able to purchase a machine with leading-edge speed and that great GUI. Having the power of UNIX hiding behind a great GUI with the CPU power to do whatever you want will also lead to some amazing new applications that take advantage of what the G5 has to offer ... at least, that's my prediction.

The Last Word

In my opinion, and confirmed by benchmarks both here and on other sites, the Dual G5 is an amazingly quick and powerful computer. It runs quietly (unless you boot it into single user mode and use it that way!) and is capable of some truly impressive number crunching. It also represents the first steps into a whole new performance realm for Apple, and that bodes well for the future.

Things Apple got right with this machine include the overall design; the presence of eight RAM slots; the ingenious airflow management; the easy to work with case; the speed of the CPUs, RAM, video cards, and system bus; and the very well designed inputs on both the back and front of the machine.

On the downside, I think Apple still needs to come up with a "pro" model that would offer two (or more) externally accessible drive bays, more room inside the case for additional drives and potentially slots for more than three PCI cards. And if Apple can figure out how to put a G5 in a laptop, they'll sell as many as they can make. Lacking either of those options now, however, the Dual G5 is clearly the correct choice for anyone that makes their living pushing their machine to its limits ... and for anyone else who can convince themselves they should be in that category (like me!).

Tech Note - About This Review

This report was created on the Dual G5 using a combination of tools. The HTML pages were created with the 30-day trial version of Dreamweaver MX. I'm sure I probably munged up the HTML/CSS while editing the templates, so place all blame for such errors squarely on my shoulders. Dreamweaver, which ran quite slowly on my G4/733, had no such issues on the G5. About the only thing I noticed is that there's some sort of scrolling glitch that causes the cursor to suddenly jumps to the bottom of a page for no apparent reason. I may very well invest in Dreamweaver for the G5, though I wish the code worked a bit better on slower hardware.

The charts were created in Keynote, all graphics were edited with Photoshop Elements, Snapz Pro X was used for the movie capture and screenshots, and everything was uploaded to the web server with Transmit.

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