Product Reviews

The new Power Mac 1GHz DP, launched by Apple last month, is the first desktop Mac to ship with the Xserve-based motherboard architecture.

This architecture is designed to provide the fastest possible data throughput to and from each element in the system and to ensure that there are no bottlenecks. The 1GHz G4 dual processors are fed by 1Mb of backside cache a processor, up to 2Gb of double data rate (DDR) SDRAM (256Mb in the standard configuration) and a 167MHz system bus, compared with the 133MHz bus on the 867MHz DP.

Mac OS X 10.2 is preinstalled and the Quartz Extreme graphics technology it utilises is designed to make full use of today's powerful graphics processors. For this reason, the Power Mac 1GHz DP comes with one of the fastest graphics cards available on the Mac, ATI's Radeon 9000 with 64Mb DDR RAM. This is slotted into a 4x AGP slot, leaving the Power Mac's four PCI slots free.

For the first time in many years, the graphics output connectors don't include a VGA port. Instead, the card has one Apple Display Connector (ADC) and one Digital Video Interface (DVI) output. There's a DVI-to-VGA adaptor in the box, although Apple is trying to guide its users towards digital LCD setups. The two ports can be used for a two monitor setup, either in extended desktop form or for video mirroring.

The hard drive on the new 1GHz machine is an 80Gb, 7200rpm device mounted on an ATA/100 bus. Just as in the 867MHz DP machine (see Reviews in depth, 6 September 2002, p38), the hard drive is mounted on the side of the chassis, and there's room for one more drive on the bus. There's also an ATA/66 bus with room for two hard drives, and, if you add a SCSI PCI card, you can fit up to four SCSI drives (you'll need to remove the ATA drive), or a combination of two SCSI drives and two ATA drives.

Spare parts

This mid-range machine includes a SuperDrive as standard, with an additional 5.25in bay below it, which means a further optical drive can be fitted. The only option on the Apple Store

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is to add a DVD ROM/ CD-RW combo drive to this slot. However, we suspect many users will want to fit a fast CD-RW to this bay, given the SuperDrive's restricted 8x writing and 24x reading speeds.

Externally, the Power Mac 1GHz DP is exactly the same as the 867MHz machine. Four cooling vents sit at the bottom of the front of the case, while the optical drive bays are covered by a chrome-effect plastic, and on that panel there's also the power button and a headphone mini-jack. The speaker is now situated above the optical drives.

The rear connectivity options feature 100/1000 Base-T Ethernet, two USB ports, two FireWire ports, headphone mini-jack and Apple's Pro Speaker port. There are two changes from the previous Power Mac range: the microphone mini-jack has been revived and the modem has been firmware upgraded to support v.92. The new modem protocol supports faster handshake and enables users to interrupt the connection to take a phone call.

We examined the 1GHz DP model using the same set of tests that we used on the 867MHz DP machine. We were particularly interested to see if there was any performance boost above that which could be expected due to the increased processor speed.

We were disappointed that the results were no better than if everything other than the processor clock speed had remained equal (see Speed tests, above). On the FileMaker Pro test, the 1GHz model was 14% quicker than the 867MHz, while the Photoshop and Cinebench tests showed improvements of 6% and 12.5% respectively. So, in our tests at least, the new motherboard architecture makes no difference to performance. This might be because there's a bottleneck at the processor, so faster processors will benefit more from the new motherboard.

Middle of the road

In recent Power Mac ranges, the mid-range model has offered the best combination of value and performance. This isn't the case here. The Power Mac 1GHz DP costs £550 more than its 867MHz cousin, but for that you get a marginal speed boost, a SuperDrive in place of a combo drive, 20Gb extra hard drive space and a ATI Radeon 9000 instead of an Nvidia GeForce4 MX.

Configuring an 867MHz DP on the Apple Store so that it has the SuperDrive, Radeon 9000 and 80Gb hard drive only adds £250, so the only question is whether the additional performance boost is worth £300. We don't think so.

If you need the fastest Mac around, wait until the 1.25GHz DP ships. It has double the backside cache of this model, which should povide a sizeable performance boost. There's just not enough performance or value in the 1GHz DP model to recommend it.