Clockwork | Graphite Workstation:::

• Dual 533MHz PowerPC G4
• 1250MB PC133MHz RAM
• Apple ATI Radeon 32MB

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This machine marked my switch from a life of Windows into Mac. Purchased back in 2001 for $3200 USD, Clockwork has been my main workstation for a few years now. What has helped it age gracefully would be its Dual processors. This thing still holds its own in Quake 3. :)

While having only a single optical drive it benefits from having over 6 bays for hard drives. For the optical I have the stock DVD-ROM drive. For storage I have a 200GB Western Digital with 8MB of cache, great drive. It also comes with 4 64-bit PCI slots (the long kind) and a AGP 4x port. The AGP is occupied by the stock Apple ATI Radeon card which is in need of an upgrade. I'd go for either a Radeon 9000 or 9600 whenever ATI released them to retail. The slots are bare for now except for a Sonnet Tempo Trio card that serves a few functions. It is a USB2 / FireWire 400 hub offering 2 USB2 and 2 FireWire 400 slots. It is also an ATA-133 controller card with 48-bit addressing so my 200GB Western Digital drive can be formatted correctly.

Among video card options I'd also like a SuperDrive and 1.5GHz processor upgrade. Just recently Apple unveiled the Power Mac G5. The specs are great but the machine is all speed and little else. Optical bays were reduced back to one, and it can only use Serial ATA drives (2). As much as I love speed there needs to be more. Hopefully Apple will focus on the "rest of the package" with future revs of the G5.