Dual 1GHz Mac: Better Machine, Better Price Bentonville AR

Posted by : Dennis Sellers

Apple has finally broken the 1GHz barrier with a new high-end Power Mac G4 mini-tower. In fact, the company's new top-of-the-line system sports two 1GHz chips for $500 less than its previous best-of model. When you consider that this model has the industry's first NVIDIA GeForce4 graphics card and a software bundle that's been sweetened considerably, the $2,999 dual-processor system is a fine buy for professional users.

Delivering 15 gigaflops (15 billion floating point operations per second), the dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 runs software such as Adobe Photoshop up to 72 percent faster and encodes DVD Video over 300 percent faster than a 2GHz Pentium 4-based PC, according to Apple.

The dual GHz machine comes with Mac OS X as the default operating system (though you can choose to boot up into Mac OS 9, if you prefer). Since the new operating system supports symmetric multiprocessing, the new Mac is the perfect machine for running Mac OS X and OS X native applications. It enables the operating system, as well as applications, to take full advantage of dual processors for some serious performance gains.

Powering the new line of G4 mini-towers are Apollo G4 chips that not only offer GHz performance, but also (for the technically minded among you) fabrication using Silicon On Insulator (SOI) technology and an improved power consumption/performance ratio.

The Apollo has four integer-execution units, one double-precision floating proces...

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