Best Mac: Apple G5

Sleek lines, fast acceleration, and incredible horsepower: No, it’s not a new road rage movie at your local Cineplex; it’s the new Power Mac G5 from Apple Computer.

Designed new from the ground up, Apple claims it’s the world’s fastest personal computer and the first with a 64-bit processor. Powered by IBM’s new PowerPC 970 chip, it dramatically increases processing speed when working with software programs like Adobe Photoshop and 3D-graphics and video applications that need to squeeze every bit of computing power out of a PC. In head-to-head tests with 3 GHz Pentium 4-based systems, Photoshop runs more than twice as fast on a Power Mac G5. On the graphics side, the G5 supports and ships with ultra fast cards like the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200 Ultra. It also comes equipped with a FireWire 800 port, two FireWire 400 ports and three USB 2.0 ports (plus two USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard). Standard is the SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) that burns CDs and DVDs that can be played on most consumer DVD players.

The G5 comes in 3 models, all shipping with an updated version of Mac OS X Jaguar, bringing the operating system to 10.2.7. The update contains enhancements for technologies found in the G5; 1.6 GHz ($1999), 1.8Ghz ($2399) and the ultimate muscle version dual 2 GHz models ($2999) from Apple Computer.www.apple.com