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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