PC Magazine has an online review of the new 24″ Penryn processor iMac. It’s a good read if you are interested in Mac hardware.
It’s a better read if you are thinking of buying a new Mac. Joel Santo Domingo writes:
The iMac’s E8235 processor is one of the new 45-nm “Penryn” models, and as such it has a little more oomph than the “Merom”-based T7700 processor of the 20-inch iMac I’d last reviewed. Our Photoshop CS3 test results show this performance boost clearly. Although the 20-inch had scored a still-quick 42 seconds running Mac Os X, the latest iMac finished in a mere 34 seconds. In Windows, the 24-inch finished in a blazing 30 seconds, barely half the time it took the old iMac (58 seconds).
That means that even if you’re a Photoshop wiz, you don’t necessarily need a Mac Pro. The new 24-inch iMac has the same screen resolution as a Mac Pro with an Apple 23-inch Cinema HD screen, and is fast enough to do real work. The Mac Pro is thousands of dollars more expensive, and is more of a serious professional workstation with dual quad-core processors and higher-end graphics cards. The real reason to get the Mac Pro these days is if you absolutely need expansion cards for things like multiple monitors, higher end workstation-class graphics cards, you need more internal hard drives, or you must have the power of eight CPU cores working on your time-critical rendering project. Compared with the latest iMac, working on most photos, illustrations, page layout, and general office projects on a Mac Pro is overk
He ran a number of tests running Windows:
Running Windows, the iMac finished the Windows Media Encoder test in 1 minute, 3 seconds, a swift score for a dual-core system. Speedy dual cores (like the Falcon NW FragBox 8500) have been hovering around one minute, while the fastest quad-core systems like the Polywell Poly X3800 are closer to the 30-second range. Put simply, the iMac is one fast Windows PC.
Not only is the new iMac fast, it is “green”. Apple will help you recycle your old PC or Mac when you buy a new iMac. The new machine also has EPEAT and Energy Star certifications. It’s very efficient sleeping, idling and running. Not the most efficient, but still really good.
Joel compares the new iMac with the Gateway One and the Dell XPS One, with both having good features, but concludes that in the technology race the iMac has leapt ahead for now.
To sum up, I love the design, like the performance, and I am happy with the price/features ratio of the new 24-inch iMac with Penryn. I can even see some users buying one to run in Windows Vista or XP exclusively; though of course I’m sure Apple would rather you use Mac Os X. In any case, even though there are a slew of new competitors to the iMac, none of them have quite enough innovation or execution to dethrone the king of the all-in-one desktops.
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