The middle two Power Macs can upgrade to the ATI Radeon 9650 for only $50.
Previously that required a graphics-card upgrade, but the high-end Power Mac comes with an ATI Radeon 9650 card that can handle the task.
The target audience should love that the dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5 can now drive a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display out of the box. Why Apple continues to torment customers with a one-button mouse is a mystery to which only Steve Jobs knows the answer. Remember to budget extra for speakers (no, $2,999 doesn't get you a pair of speakers), a keyboard with dedicated media keys, and a two-button mouse with a scrollwheel. That's steep, but in line with comparable Windows models, such as the Velocity Micro ProMagix DCX once you've added a monitor.
The base configuration of this Power Mac costs $2,999, but the system we tested comes to $5,397 with memory and graphics upgrades plus Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 20-inch Cinema Display. The double-layer support seems designed to coincide with the inclusion of the high-definition H.264 codec in OS 10.4, allowing you to burn an entire high-definition project on one disc.
Likewise, it's increasingly rare for a comparable Windows PC not to have a built-in card reader-something no Mac has ever had-or to offer only a single optical drive.Īlthough the Apple Power Mac G5 has only one optical drive, it's been improved to a 4X DVD+R double-layer drive (it also handles DVD±RW and CD-RW discs). High-end Windows PCs routinely offer more ports. Plug in a mouse and a keyboard, and you'll use up two of those USB ports however, if you use the Apple keyboard and monitor, you'll gain two USB 2.0 and two FireWire ports on the back of the monitor and two USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard.
Still, two hard drive bays is the bare minimum for a system in this class.Īpple is stubbornly keeping the number of USB and FireWire ports low, with one USB 2.0 port on the front and two on the back, one FireWire 400 port on the front and one on the back, and a FireWire 800 port on the back.
A free storage bay lets you add a second hard drive for a possible total of 800GB of storage (ours had the standard 250GB Serial ATA 7,200rpm drive) that's an improvement over the previous high-end Power Mac, which topped out at 500GB. Our system also came with 4GB of 400MHz DDR SDRAM (up from the standard of 512MB) in four 1GB sticks, leaving four slots vacant. PCIe, the wider-bandwidth expansion bus found in newer Windows-based PCs), but if you choose the build-to-order Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card to populate the AGP slot (as in our test system), it will block the adjacent PCI-X slot. The Power Mac has three free PCI-X slots (not to be confused with PCI-Express, a.k.a. The Power Mac G5 is still an excellent machine, but no more so than last year's system was at the time. We appreciate that the baseline price with the added features remains at $2,999, but Apple is really just keeping pace with the march of technology. The same curious Apple shortcomings on which we previously commented remain, however, such as the lack of a second optical drive, a minimum of ports, and no option for a flash card reader. We tested this model and found other improvements-double-layer DVD support and out-of-the-box support for a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD display-that will please its target market of video and design professionals. In a flurry of new releases, including the latest version of OS X and new versions of its professional video applications, Apple has boosted its high-end Power Mac G5 line so that the top configuration now has dual 2.7GHz G5 processors.