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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Power Mac G5: Still not the world's fastest personal computer (Part two)
PC World's benchmark tests pitting the dual processor Apple Power Mac G5 against a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, Athlon 64 3200+, Athlon 64 FX-51, and Opteron 246 prove the G5 "isn't the world's fastest desktop PC after all ... and the results make Apple's claim to the desktop performance crown look rather foolish." What a surprise. Here are the somewhat predictable results of this competition. As PC World notes in its write-up, "Apple's latest OS X has 64-bit extensions, providing the new Mac G5s and a few optimized apps a taste of greater power. But that isn't quite enough to give Apple a wholesale performance edge ... Even Apple's 2-GHz dual-CPU G5 unit had a hard time keeping up with a single-chip [AMD] FX-51 PC in most tests. The new Macs aren't great values either, as the top-of-the-line G5 ($3549 as configured) costs about $200 more than the similarly configured Alienware Aurora." The PCs even beat out Apple in the QuickTime test, go figure. Personally, I think the most egregious results involve the single processor Pentium 4 system beating out Apple's high-end dual-processor 2.0 GHz G5 system: The single P4 beat out Apple on both Quake III tests, both Microsoft Word tests, and the QT test. Embarassing. The single processor P4 system also beat out the single processor 1.8 GHz G5 on every single benchmark. Pfft.

[ Posted at 10:53 AM | Permalink ]