Apple vs. PC: Is the debate over yet?
WinInfo | at | by Mike
The release of PCs based on the 3.06 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor has ignited another round of Macintosh vs. PC comparisons and this time it's gotten ugly. Sorry, Apple fans, but a low-cost Dell PC now significantly outperforms a significantly more expensive Power Mac for image and digital video editing, long considered the last bastions of the Mac. According to the Digital Video Editing Web site, the Mac has been "slaughtered again," with the PC running all of the PhotoShop and After Effects benchmarks nearly twice as fast as the Mac. So how does the PC do it? Well, the humongous MHz gap helps (3.06 GHz vs. the fastest Mac, a 1.25 GHz dual processor machine), as does Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology, which lets a single processor machine behave like a dual processor box. But the PC also offers PC1066 RDRAM and a 512 MHz front-end bus, making the Mac look old-school. And so on. In conclusion, the site says, time is money. "If you have an After Effects composite that needs, say, two hours to render on the Mac, it'll take you about an hour and 10 minutes on this PC," the review reads.