Fredstar said:
Hi Fredstar. I would give the fact that you wish to get involved in more hefty graphics situations in the future a route to going down the Powermac line.
That's not to say that the iMac couldn't cope with it though but it seems like you wish to expand your system in the future and the iMac isn't the best machine to do this. For instance, you can't change the graphics card as it's on the main board (for ease of explanation), although this is the only major thing that you can't change. Adding other drives etc would be through firewire as there is only space for one inside the case and of course you can only stuff 1 G5 CPU into it.
That said though I have a 20" iMac G5 with 1GB Ram and the thing flies along compared to my Wintel box which was a 3Ghz/1GB/128mb GPU, which now has the glorious task of being placed in the garage and used as a digital media server. Coming myself from many years of PC's I am amazed at the streamlined nature of how the iMac works. A 64MB graphics card on a PC playing todays games has a few problems in keeping up but this spec iMac doesn't break into a sweat on most games and applications. Ok a 128mb card should have been the choice for Apple, but for me and what I use this for, mainly the computer that is, as Apple like to brand it as, at the centre of my digital life.
So in short, if you're going to be doing some heavy duty processing tasks and want expandability, go for the Powermac.
One thing I do find hard to get my head around is that Windows boxes are all about brute force to get the task done, whilst Apple goes about it in a nice elegant streamlined way. But I don't need to tell anyone on this forum that
