On Feb 1, 2005, at 7:04 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
Yesterday I stopped into a nearby Apple store to look at the Cinema
displays and to find out if they'd work on a PC. Oh, my, that 30" display
is A-mazing.
At the last Apple show here they had two of these set up in a dual-head configuration. I don't have a desk that big!
They just dropped the prices of the Cinema Displays, too :) I've had my eye on the 23" model for a while but it's difficult to convince myself to go back to a single screen.
While wiping the slobber from my chin I was also impressed
with how quiet the Mac was compared to the jet sounding high-end Intel
PC's. Mine has SEVEN fans, and sometimes it seems that a blimp would be a
great accessory.
IIRC the single-processor G5s have 7 fans, the dual-processors have 9. They're all speed-controlled and are specially-designed to run at very low idle speeds so the machine remains very quiet during normal operation. I've had mine speed up a little bit when running a heavy Photoshop tool on a big file but it's only very slightly louder than idle, and only for a few seconds.
So, Mac users, is the Power Mac G5 the high end for the machine?
For workstations it's the biggest, baddest Mac you can buy.
The next model down is the iMac which is the consumer line. They've recently been redesigned to use G5 processors. These have an LCD screen built-in (I should say the computer is built into the LCD). They aren't quite as fast or expandable but they're even quieter and they take up very little space.
After that comes the newly-released Mac mini, a very small and stylish little G4 box designed to tempt PC users to try the Mac platform. All you get when you buy one is the box. Add your own screen, keyboard and mouse and away you go.
And at the bottom of the range is the eMac, a rugged, low-cost all-in-one G4 built for the educational market.
Talk to me about speed, memory, number, size and speed of hard drives it can support, what processors can it use, and so forth.
For detailed specs take a look at http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html
Inside the box you can easily add one extra hard drive. The hard disk interface is Serial ATA. FYI the drives they use are Seagate Barracuda. I've heard of third-party kits for fitting even more drives but there's also the option of using an external FireWire drive. I don't know of any limit to the hard drive size.
As for memory, the 1.8GHz goes up to 4Gb (in 4 slots) and the 2 and 2.5GHz models take up to 8Gb (in 8 slots). Currently a single application can only allocate up to 4Gb but this will change in future releases of OS X as its 64-bit support improves (it'll depend on 64-bit apps as well). I'd have loved to have 8 slots in my machine because 1Gb modules cost more than a pair of 512Mb. Apple is a little slack with the standard memory configuration. A PowerMac really should come with 1Gb as standard.
BTW I have the entry-level of the earliest release... the single processor 1.6GHz. It's perfectly fast enough for me. It's difficult to compare clock speeds directly between different architectures so don't be put off by the numbers being lower. You'll see benchmarks that say the G5 smokes the Pentium 4, and you'll see benchmarks that say the Pentium 4 whips the G5.
But when you're comparing numbers, think about how long you wait for Photoshop to finish something compared to how long it has to wait for you. After an hour spent spotting dust out of a file I don't care if a USM filter takes 5 seconds or 6 seconds. Having said that I do find the Healing Brush tool frustrating when working on very large files, but I'm blaming Adobe for that.
Besides the hardware there are a lot of things about OS X itself that you may or may not find attractive (the Apple website has quite a lot of info). The one feature that really sold me on the Mac was Expos�. The user-interface does take a week or two to get used to if you're coming from a long history of PC usage.
Oh and one last thing. Yes it does come with a one-button mouse. No, you don't have to use it. OS X supports any multi-button USB mouse you care to plug in. (Sorry... some people like to whine about the mouse)
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
