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PC Magazine Praises G4 Tower's Performance


It seems the Mac crowd is harder on Apple hardware’s performance than the PC press is. Troy Dreier, writing for PC Magazine’s First Looks section in the February 4 issue, calls the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 “one fast machine.” In a benchmark in Adobe Photoshop, the magazine finds that cross-platform comparisons with a new 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Hyper-Threading, the G4 outpaces the PC in every test but one, the Gaussian Blur, in which the match was a draw. He reports the G4 is faster at Sharpen Edges, Unsharp Mask, Despeckle, Convert to RGB, and Resize (presumably thanks to the Velocity Engine, and Photoshop’s dual processing support and G4 optimization). The article also praises improvements over previous G4 towers. We’ve seen many “bake-offs” from Apple, but lest PC Magazine be accused of being partisan, they’ve found lots from Apple to praise — and they’re a tough audience. Intel has announced yet another new generation of chips coming soon, so we here at the PowerPage are eagerly awaiting Apples based on the next generation IBM PowerPC, but it’s good to know that for now, Apple is keeping pace.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.