Mac vs. PC System Shootouts $3,200 Workstations 3103

Looking at only the amount of RAM and the support of dual link DVI in the video cards and ignoring the GPU is not selecting a similar feature set. It just comes down to the video cards are not comparable. It is no different that thinking that the 2.66 Mac Pro will perform the same as the 3.0 Mac Pro because the RAM, HDD, and optical drives are all the same.

geforce 7300 gt: 128 bit memory interface memory bandwidth: 10.7 GB-sec fill rate: 2.8 billion pixels-sec 350 million vertices-sec

quadra 3450 FX: 256 bit memory interface memory bandwidth: 32 GB-sec 4.2 Billion texels-sec (textured pixels) 150 million triangles per second (I'm a little sketchy on this one, but I'm buttuming a triangle contains

3 vertices, thus 450 million vertices per second)

Again the MacWorld article points out the difficulty in doing a comparison. While both video cards support dual link dvi and have 256 megs of ram they are not comparable in performance. If someone is wanting to run games at the highest resolution and frame rate they would select the Geforce. If you are running CAD-CAM and producing 3d models and need to render, pan, zoom and hope to limit your screen refreshes you select a Quadro or Ati FireGL.

I don't have any fault with the logic of selecting the FX3450 because it was the least expensive choice offered by Dell that included 256megs of ram and supported 1 dual link DVI.

However, the author went out of his way to point out the $1,000 price difference but inferred he wasn't sure where the extra cost was in the Dell. He speculated that Dell was charging a premium for the second processor ($895 option). He failed to inform the casual reader that he had selected the 1kw chbuttis ($600 option) and that the video card in the Dell was a higher performance card ($585 option).

Again, this article demonstrates the difficulty in trying to compare computers that are targeted at differing user industries.

Brent

Tim Adams