Apple expensive again.

From time to time I like to visit the Apple website and spec out my dream machine. It has been bothering me in the last few months that as Apple prepares to transition to Intel processors, their "top end dream machines" have been el cheapo. You know, a mere "5,000 for the top spec.

Therefore the latest round of upgrades give me great comfort. The top end PowerMac now has four (4!) dualcore G5s. That's 8 cores, folks. It also accepts 16Gb of RAM and has 3 PCIe slots, more than any equivalent PC motherboard. That's serious "up yours" specs.

This return to form has pushed the top spec'd Apples to where they belond: the $30,000 plus category.

For reference, the spec is:

Apple PowerMac Quad Dualcore G5 system of my dreams

CPUs: 4x Dualcore G5s, 2.5Ghz cores.
RAM: 8x 2Gb - 16Gb total.
HDD: 2x500Gb SATA.
Gfx: nVidia QUADRO FX 4500, 512Mb RAM.
Net: 2x onboard gigabit ethernet, Apple bluetooth and Airport Extreme (54Mbps wifi)
Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse
Screen: 2x Apple 30" HD Display ($4000 each).

Total: $35,279.99

After student discount: :D $31,045.30

Thank you. I'm all geeked out for today.

Anyone that spends 30k on any computer, much less an apple, needs to be shot.

I can find nothing that says it uses four dual core chips...

Its called the quad because it uses 2 dual core chips, hence four processors.

Now you need to think bigger anyways

you can slap 4x 6600's in there, and run EIGHT, yes eight 23inch cinema displays....

now THAT is desktop realestate :P
From the apple website:
Eight 20-inch or 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays can be connected to the Power Mac G5 using four NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics cards.

*drools*

*drops to floor and starts convulsing*

Super Specs and only Sata Harddrives? *shakes head in disbelief*

Anyway, seems like a nice system to browse the web with..

And you need a PC, sorry, I mean an Apple, that's worth that much... why?

What do you intend to do on it. :P

HDTV 3D holographic pr0n :p

dude... just build a PC and put x86 Tiger on it and your all good :P

yay, lets go and buy that Apple pc so that in 5 years time it becomes obselete, anyhow, wats the point in such high specs? no games require those specs yet, not for atleast another 10 years or so anyhow

perhaps, now i know this may be a hard concept, but perhaps, just perhaps, it's not a gaming machine?

Any pc u buy now will more then likly be obselete in 5 yrs. Heck i upgrade mine every year to keep up with the times, paladin upgrades his every 3-4 months.

Using a mac for games is like using a hammer to slice someone's head off... its not physically possible :p

tell that to blizzard.

homeloan = top spec mac LOL.

Quote from BrAiN DaNcE:
I can find nothing that says it uses four dual core chips...

Tada!
http://www.apple.com/au/powermac/dualcore.html

Good point about the extra gfx cards. With an extra 4 Quadros and 6 cinema displays, you can almost double the cost.

Though in all seriousness, 2 Apple 30inch monitors is already serious BSage.

Quote from leonami:
Using a mac for games is like using a hammer to slice someone's head off... its not physically possible :p

It depends on the game. For most games, no, you're right. I imagine that more games will release on Mac after the Macintels are settled in. Maybe 5 years? Apple would be wise to look at ways to simplify porting DirectX code to run on OS X.

Quote from El Presidente:
Tada!
http://www.apple.com/au/powermac/dualcore.html

Good point about the extra gfx cards. With an extra 4 Quadros and 6 cinema displays, you can almost double the cost.

2 points..

Still looking for those extra missing processors
Quote from Apple.com:

Enter the dual-core PowerPC G5 processor: one silicon chip with two independent 2.5GHz processor cores. Now take two of those chips and you have the Power Mac G5 Quad, for groundbreaking quad-core processing.

Only thing it says about 8 is
Quote from Apple.com:

Eight Double-Precision Floating-Point Units

The PowerPC G5 core contains two double-precision floating-point units, each capable of performing a multiply and an add at the same time. This means a Power Mac G5 Quad, with four processor cores and a total of eight floating-point units, can complete up to sixteen 64-bit floating-point operations in a single cycle.

Read that sentence, the core contains 2 FPU units, 4 cores = 8 units... not 8 cores...

And the second point, Quadros are an agp 16x only, there is only 1 agp 16x port on the mobo, so for the other cards, you have to go with the GF 6600, and then they can only run the 23 inch displays, not the 30 inch ones.

Edit: oh look something else too

You need to have all four cards as the 6600's as
Quote from Apple.com:

or NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 with 512MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, two dual-link DVI ports, and one stereo 3D port (occupies PCI Express 16-lane slot and adjacent four-lane slot)

Man I love it when I am right and he is wrong

Oh, looks like I was wrong. Curse you, Apple!

Also, for the record, this is El Presidente being dead flatout stupid wrong :)

*eats crow pie made of hat pastry*

[edit]

Though I'm right about the GF6600. (double edit: but not the quadro)

From http://www.apple.com/au/displays/specs.html:

Quote from "apple.com.au":
Any new dual- or quad-core Power Mac G5 supports two Apple Cinema Displays, including dual-link DVI for one 30-inch model. Support for two 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Displays requires two dual-link DVI ports, available in configurations with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 or by installing an additional NVIDIA 6600 card. Support for more than two displays requires installation of one or more additional NVIDIA 6600 cards.

It's a bit of a confused system, really. 4 Cores and 16gb of ram is server, not desktop material. But then, who needs a super graphics card and 2 30" displays for a server? Hmmm, maybe video editing? Well it has only sata hdds, not scsi - so it's not really excelling there either. Great machine for the 'wank' factor. Wouldn't spend $35,000 on it though.

Quote from El Presidente:
It depends on the game. For most games, no, you're right. I imagine that more games will release on Mac after the Macintels are settled in. Maybe 5 years? Apple would be wise to look at ways to simplify porting DirectX code to run on OS X.

Considering that macintels will supposedly be x86 compliant, you could probably just run windows...

El Presidente was wrong and admitted it. Holy mother of God.

I guess it's because the facts got in the way of his fantasy. There are no facts in politics, so as wrong as he is, no one can prove it, and his fantasy lives on. ;)

Quote from rec:
There are no facts in politics

John Howard is PM.

Is that not a fact firmly rooted in politics?
:p

Quote from leonami:
Considering that macintels will supposedly be x86 compliant, you could probably just run windows...

You do realise that Intel invented the x86 ISA, don't you? That infact x86 came from their chip series designations? 8086, 386, 486 etc.

And yes, Apple have officially confirmed that they won't do anything to prevent Windows running on their hardware, so it'll come down to Microsoft supporting EDI firmware upon boot.

Actually I suspect Apple rather look forward to having people compare Vista to Leopard on the same hardware.

Well in terms of Hardware, won't it essentially be the same? I mean to cut costs wouldn't intel simply just find a processor and chipset they are already mass producing and decide to make that the 'mac' hardware?

that aint a desktop computer. appart for the monitor everything is for a server. and just becuase the harddrives arent scsi doesnt mean its not a server. but it is a stupid computer to buy. for a business or a person.

video editing/rendering workstation imo.

yeah video editing systems don't generally use the internal hdd for storage, so it's not inconceivable that this is a video editing system.

Quote from leonami:
Well in terms of Hardware, won't it essentially be the same? I mean to cut costs wouldn't intel simply just find a processor and chipset they are already mass producing and decide to make that the 'mac' hardware?

Not exactly. Macs are almost PCs already - they use PCI slots, SATA drives, HyperTransport etc etc to keep costs down. It used to be that Macs were almost entirely custom, but these days only the CPU and firmware is different.

Now most PCs use a BIOS to boot, that's their firmware. This sort of stuff has lingered for ages and Intel have been talking about replacing it. Of course Microsoft can't really be bothered to code to the replacement (EDI) until hardware manufacturers use it - but what PC maker will put in hardware that Windows won't support?

Apple, of course. So for a while it won't be possible to load Windows on an Apple, because the firmware is incompatible with old BIOS systems. I expect that Microsoft will follow Apple's lead like they do with Mac OS and then PC makers will follow Apple's lead like they did with USB.

Quote from Harbinger:
yeah video editing systems don't generally use the internal hdd for storage, so it's not inconceivable that this is a video editing system.

You can add a fibrechannel card for $300 or so. Mostly to talk to these:

http://www.apple.com/au/xserve/raid/

those nice big expensive macs usally have a firewire 800 connection to a lacie data centre :D mmmmmmm 2 tb's :D

As my link demonstrated, they'd be better off with an Apple Xserve RAID. Mmmm 7 Tb.