joe_henry1000

Beth,

When did that happen? Thanks for the offer (?) but I think I'll hang on to my iLife anyway. ;-) I just talked my bride into letting me buy OWC's Mercury Extreme 1.25-1.33ghz processor upgrade. That'll get me through another year or so when I'll be ready to fork over the dough for a G5. Wish I could now but with remodeling our house and buying a new vehicle I just can't do it just yet.

Ray,

Actually the dual 1.8ghz is considered to be the best value by many (including MacWorld) and if I could buy one today that'd be it.

As for benchmarks, I can't remember seeing any comparing the dual 1.8 and the the 2.0 yet. There are plenty of benchmarks out there comparing the original 3 models, however. Here's <http://www.macworld.com/2003/09/reviews/macworldlabfirstg5testresults> MacWorlds benchmarks. Barefeats <http://www.barefeats.com/speedtests.html> is a good place to find info on comparisons between the G5's and PC's. The problem with comparing benchmarks between the different chips is that the benchmarking suites are usually optimized for a particular platform. So when Apple came out and claimed the G5 was the fastest personal computer on the planet, they were right according to the benchmarking programs they used that were optimized for the G5 chip. Conversely, when using benchmarking programs optimized for AMD and Intel chips, you can probably guess how those went.

Suffice it to say that the G5 run's neck and neck with the best that Intel and AMD can offer. Here is a PC World <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274182,00.asp> review that says just that. In all the stuff I've read the G5 beats Intel and AMD a little more than half the time but Intel and AMD usually win out in a few area's including Frames-per-second tests used for gaming.

If your USB PCI card is a 3 volt card, it should work. Check out this kbase article <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86513> for details.

I'm probably not the best guy to ask about extended warranty plans. In my younger days, for a brief time I sold electronics for Sears. We were required to hammer people for extended warranty plans and I'm embarrassed to say, I actually got pretty good at selling them. You see, these plans are very, very profitable and that's why companies like Sears, Dell, Apple, Circuit City, etc., really go after them. The reason they are so profitable is because they are used very rarely. As you can probably guess by now, I don't believe in them nor do I buy them.

Geez, now I've gone and contributed at least 4 cents.

Joe