Power Mac G4 Review
by
Steve Mandeson
Computers get marginally faster every year, but once or twice in a decade, we experience a breakthrough that leaps far beyond these incremental steps. This month Sexbuzz presents such a breakthrough: the new Power Mac G4. The new, G4 microprocessor, is the first that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop. This is not just the fastest Mac in history. It's the fastest personal computer in history. The new Power Mac G4 is up to a stunning 100% to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs.
Apple loves building the best-designed computers in the world. Its enclosure has evolved to a highly polished silver and graphite, yet it still offers easy access to every internal component through its unique swing-open side door. Beneath its new face, however, is where the Power Mac G4 really shines. At its core is a brand-new brain the G4 processor. Power Mac G4 features a 100MHz system bus with three times the memory bandwidth of the G3. As well as superfast Ultra ATA/66 hard drives and accelerated AGP 2X graphics. With software applications demanding more resources you could use all the additional horsepower the Power Mac G4 provides. With one megabyte of backside level-2 cache running at half the processor speed, and a 100MHz system bus supporting up to 800-megabytes-per-second data throughput, the Power Mac G4 delivers pulse-pounding performance. And when you've completed your projects, shooting those big files across the network is a snap. Because every new Power Mac G4 comes with 10/10,00BASE-T Ethernet built in.
The secret of the G4's revolutionary performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. The Velocity Engine can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors. The PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine works with the PowerPC architecture to accelerate the data-intensive processing required by next-generation video, voice and graphics applications. Among the G4 key features is a vector permuting function capable of rearranging data in the registers. These vector processing acceleration advantages give the G4 microprocessor a significant edge when it comes to fast visualization of large data sets, and intensive math for real-time simulations. Making the G4 perfect for everything from graphics and 3D games to astronomy, and predictive modeling. Typical Photoshop tasks run twice as fast on the Power Mac G4 as they do on the fastest Pentium III-based PCs, with specific Photoshop filters running up to four times faster. Gigaflops really do matter when your work revolves around graphics, animation, 3D games and a host of other computation-hungry software.
Its optional DVD or DVD-RAM drives let you watch movies on your Mac and play the latest cutting-edge multimedia DVD discs while maintaining full compatibility with CD-ROM titles and audio CDs. The DVD-RAM drive can read from and write to DVD-RAM discs with a capacity of up to 5.2 gigabytes. The Power Mac G4 includes three 64-bit-wide PCI slots for video acceleration and special effects processing boards. Now with 400Mbps FireWire built in, you can pull video, with pristine digital quality, directly from your digital video camcorder to your Power Mac G4. For gamers, the Power Mac G4 and OpenGL combination lets developers harness the power of the hardware acceleration to create great games.
The perfect companion for the Power Mac G4 is the Apple Cinema Display, a 22-inch LCD monitor perfect for digital video. Its viewable area is as big as a 24-inch flat CRT display. But it's twice as bright and sharp, with triple the contrast ratio and zero flicker. And its millions of colors remain true from almost any viewing angle. Like a movie theater, the Apple Cinema Display has a letterbox format (1600x1024 pixels), with room enough to display an entire 11x17 image. And unlike most other displays, it receives its data digitally from the computer, preserving the highest-quality image. The Apple Cinema Display is state-of-the-art technology but if you don't want to spend a lot of money you can purchase a Power Mac compatible monitor instead of the Apple Cinema Display.
The Power Mac G4 is the most massively expandable Macintosh in history. Factor in support for more than 100 gigabytes of internal hard disk storage. Two or three 400-megabit-per-second FireWire ports for connecting up to 63 digital video cameras, hard disk drives and high-speed multimedia peripherals, plus two USB ports for connecting up to 127 peripherals per channel.
Apple did it again. Power Mac G4 is incredibly fast and beautiful at the same time. The new G4 chip inside the Power Mac G4 is basically a super computer on a chip. It's delivering super performance to personal computers for the first time. Also its price is very low for this level of performance. The Power Mac G4 is priced at $1,500 for the 400 megahertz model and $3,500 for the 500 megahertz version, if you would like to add a good 17-inch monitor with about $2,200 you could have the best personal computer on your desk. What are you waiting for?
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Computers get marginally faster every year, but once or twice in a decade, we experience a breakthrough that leaps far beyond these incremental steps. This month Sexbuzz presents such a breakthrough: the new Power Mac G4. The new, G4 microprocessor, is the first that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop.
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