My dual-dual-core PowerMac arrived this week. I had to go with the “low-end” graphics card, because there’s a 6-8 week delay on the better one (I simply refused to consider the best one, which would have added $1,650 to the price), but performance is quite spiffy, and the machine is quite quiet in normal operation.
How quiet? I can occasionally hear a bit of drive noise when it’s chugging away, but I’ve yet to be able to pick the fans out from the background noise in my house. I’m sure that will change when I really start pounding on the CPUs, but when it’s idle, I forget that it’s turned on.
Sadly, since I’ve come down with the seasonal muck, it’s all I can do to sit up long enough to play World of Warcraft for a few hours. The good news is that I can crank up all the video options and still get 30 frames/sec on my 20” Cinema Display. Well, except in front of the bank in Ironforge, but that problem’s on the other end.
Configuration details:
The machine it’s replacing is a dual 1GHz G4 (WindTunnel aka “Dual Mirrored Doors”), so some performance improvement is to be expected. :-)