This article describes the Power Mac G4. The technical specifications can be found in TIL article 58434: " Power Mac G4: Technical Specs ".

Apple designed the new Power Mac G4 for creative professionals who use computers as the pivotal tool of their trade, setting the pace of their work, their productivity, even their success. With its Pentium-crushing speed and convention-crushing design, the Power Mac G4 picks up where the best-selling Power Macintosh G3 left off. It's simply the fastest desktop computer ever, easily running up to a stunning 100% to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs. The Power Mac G4 is so powerful that its speed is measured in gigaflops, or billions of floating-point operations per second, just like supercomputers.

At the heart of this system is the brand-new PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine. Using vector processing, the PowerPC G4 brings supercomputer performance to the desktop for the first time. The Velocity Engine moves vector and multimedia data at superefficient speeds--it can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors. System performance is further enhanced through the use of an all-new, superfast system bus and 1 megabyte of backside cache.

Expansion is this computer's particular talent. It accommodates more than 100 gigabytes of hard disk storage and up to 1.5 gigabytes of SDRAM. 2 USB and FireWire ports let you connect to high-bandwidth peripherals such as printers, digital video cameras, hard disk drives, and more. Three 64-bit PCI slots, a feature that until recently was available only in high-end workstations, support a wide variety of expansion cards. Choose Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing software for flexible, highly productive video editing, compositing, and special effects.

When you're ready, get unwired with AirPort, Apple's new high-speed wireless local area network option. AirPort gives you the freedom to surf the Internet without cables, additional phone lines, or complicated networking hardware. Just install the AirPort wireless networking card, connect to an AirPort wireless network, and start surfing from your business, classroom, or any room in your home.

For all those who consider their desktop system a tool for expressing their creative abilities, there's finally a computer that can keep up with everything their minds can imagine--as quickly as they can imagine it. Power Mac G4.

Superior performance

• PowerPC G4 processor running at up to 450 megahertz and featuring Velocity Engine advanced vector processing technology
• 1 megabyte of backside level 2 cache running at half the processor speed
• built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet networking
• ATI RAGE 128 graphics card with 16MB of graphics memory

• support for up to 1.5 gigabytes of high-performance PC100 SDRAM
• four expansion slots, including three 64-bit PCI slots and one dedicated graphics card slot (either a 66- megahertz PCI slot or an AGP 2X slot)
• support for more than 100 gigabytes of internal hard disk storage
• two or three 400-megabit-per-second FireWire ports for connecting up to 63 devices, including digital video cameras, hard disk drives, and high-speed multimedia peripherals
• two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports for connecting up to 127 peripherals

• instant access side door makes it very easy to install cards, drives, and memory
• built-in antenna and support for optional AirPort wireless networking (some configurations)
• convenient low-power sleep/wake feature that virtually eliminates the need to shut down the computer (some configurations)

For up-to-date benchmark information, visit http://www.apple.com/powermac on the World Wide Web.