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I'm about to get a PowerMac

Impreza

Impreza

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 17, 2003
31
0
California
Like the title says, I'm about to get a PowerMac. ^_^ Anyway, I was looking into finding a dual 1ghz or just coughing up the extra cash for a dual 1.25. I'm buying a Mac cuz the PC I'm using isn't quite cutting it anymore (Pentium III, 933 built a couple years ago) and I'm iffy about files porting over to Mac and the whole font issue. I'm a student at the Academy of Art College, new media major...4th year. I still got another year and a half to go however. I'm surprised I've gone this far with a PC. Luckily I had mostly Photoshop-related classes so fonts weren't an issue at the time. :p

My main concern about the dual 1.25's are the Radeon 9000. I've heard there were some issues with those and VGA monitors. I'm running a ViewSonic 19" E790 and I'd hate to have it go to waste since it's such a huge screen and all. Is this true? A friend of mine has a dual 1ghz, she just switched from PC to Mac for art school as well, and she had power issues between the PowerMac and her VGA monitor. I'd still love to get a dual 1.25ghz with my student discount at Apple.

I was even thinking about getting an iMac 800mhz with a 15" LCD and SuperDrive for $1299 refurbed at smalldog.com just to save some money and not worry about vid card issues with the display. However, the dual processor is too sweet to pass up and I won't have to worry about my computer being obsolete too soon. I'd like to keep the computer cost itself to be around under $2000 to about $2200 just so I have enough change to buy a 1280 Epson, zip drive, and whatever. So any advice or recommendations in my situation would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
Both PowerMac models are upgradable, so you can add a Radeon 9000 or 9700 (when available) to your PowerMac. You wouldn't be able to expand an iMac as far as a PowerMac. That is the benefit of the PowerMacs.

For cheap memory: www.18004memory.com

From the cash leftover you can get a lot of the accessories you want, including 1GB of RAM.

As for monitor compatibility, I'm not sure if this is true or not.

Regardless of whether or not you will be using that monitor, if you are going to work to an extreme extent with graphics, then get the 1.25GHz dual model. If you are going to do some heavy work with Photoshop, but nothing too heavy, then you can just get a dual 1GHz model.

I've done a lot of processor heavy applications with Photoshop on my iBook 466 with only 320MB of RAM. Yes, it does take a while, but even my little limited machine gets the job done and well. Your model PowerMac should shorten the time span for waiting by a lot.
 
I'll be doing mostly design work (Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Director) and some light video editing in Premier when I take a video editing class later down the line.
 
hey

I am not sure if you can get a discount for refurb items, but if so i would reccomend the dual 1.25 system that they have their, it's not bad it has a 120 gig HD, 9000 pro w/ 64 meg card, 512 ram, and a few other things but still the price would be awesome if you could get a discount on top of the refurb price...FYI you can find the refurbs in the special deals section on the bottom left hand side of the apple store web page.




EDIT: I did a little more research and found that apple has some preconfig systems that sell for an acceptable price heres a LINK I loged in as if i went to academy of art so these are the prices you would see, on the page a few pages back they had a promotion where you could get a $100 off a hp printer if you bought a mac. Best of luck and hope you find the right machine for your needs!
 
Yea, I saw that there, it's tempting. Hehe.

Anyway, about the Radeon 9000 problem with monitors. A friend of mine said she had a problem with her VGA monitor which caused some wake-up and shut down problems on her dual G4. She bought an Apple flat-panel display and everything worked perfectly. It's that problem that's my main concern, which kinda makes me weary of buying a PowerMac right now until I do some more research on this. ^_^

Hahah..I just realized I repeated myself. Sorry about that. Oh well, just going in detail about the problem.
 
Re: hey

Originally posted by Steradian
EDIT: I did a little more research and found that apple has some preconfig systems that sell for an acceptable price heres a LINK I loged in as if i went to academy of art so these are the prices you would see, on the page a few pages back they had a promotion where you could get a $100 off a hp printer if you bought a mac. Best of luck and hope you find the right machine for your needs!
Click to expand...

Eek, that's for buying the computers for the school. There's a seperate section the students have to go through to buy it personally. I don't work for the school, nor am I going to buy it FOR the school, so it ain't gonna work. I wished I could get that dual 1.25ghz PowerMac for $1,799, but I can only get it for $1,899. Which isn't bad since it's normally about $2,000 without the discount.
 
whoops sorry I didn't understand what you had posted earlyier, I just went for the best possible price, it would be nice to have a machine for that little though :)
 
Hmm....okay, if I custom configured the computer by say....taking out the Radeon 9000 for a GeForce 4, bare in mind, I don't play computer games, would be a good idea? It'll drop the price of the computer down to $1,848 or so. I save $50 basically. I'm just iffy about the Radeon 9000 working with other monitors (mainly CRT's) aside from the Apple flat panel displays. Right now, I doubt I have the extra cash to fork over for an Apple screen. ^_^
 
hey, My dad's PM dual ghz machine (1.5 gig's of RAM :)) has a GeForce4 MX card in it and it does just fine. He does have the 128 version though avg Fps's in wolf range from (100 to 110)... my advice to you would be to just buy another graphics card with the money you saved , i.e GeForce 4 Ti 4600 :), now that's the card I would rather have in there...the card has really come down in price since the FX came out so i think you could pick it up for something like...210 $'s?
 
Don't forget that many retailers although they sell the computer for the same price they often times include extra ram, free scanners printers etc.

Depending on what state you are in, you can save big bucks on taxes by mail ordering out of state, even bigger savings than the student discount.
 
Look what I found.

http://www.macconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?product_id=333641

I've heard some good stuff about Mac Connection on this board. I'm just wondering about their "Recon" products. Anyone know first hand the quality of those? I know I can call them and ask, but I like multiple opinions about their quality on the stuff they sell. I'm familiar with the refurb systems from Small Dog and the Apple site with that 1 year warranty and stuff, but this really caught my eye cuz this looks like a real sweet deal.

Also, Small Dog is offering a dual 1ghz with a Superdrive for $1849. At least I know that one has refurb directly from Apple. http://www.smalldog.com/product/42346

Sure, it's less power than a dual 1.25ghz and it costs $150 more, but it looks like I get a simpler piece of mind. What do you guys think?
 
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