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We expected the Power Mac G4 DP 1.42 to be faster in every category. But we were surprised that the Cube with an NVIDIA GeForce3 did better on Cinebench 2003's OpenGL hardware benchmark. In addition, our Cube was 10 per cent faster from the startup chime to a full desktop even though the DP 1.42's CPUs are faster and its hard drive tests a bit faster.

The Altivec Fractal Carbon and Cinebench 2003 Rendering (DP) scores show that the raw advantage of the DP 1.42's dual processors are about 2.3:1 over the Cube's single 1.2 GHz processor.

The Xbench benchmarks indicate that the DP 1.42 is generally faster than would be expected from its 18.3 per cent faster G4 CPUs. The DP 1.42 is especially faster at the threading and memory tests.

In the so-called "real world" tests, the two machines are closely matched on the first four tests. The DP 1.42's clear advantage in CPU, RAM and System Bus speeds make little difference in these tests because they depend heavily on hard drive speed which is fairly close between the two machines.

The DP 1.42 really shines on the last four "real world" tests which depend more heavily on CPU, RAM and graphics power. The DP 1.42 is 29 per cent faster at scrolling, 39 per cent faster at exporting a movie to QuickTime DV, nearly twice as fast at ripping a CD track to MP3 and over twice as fast running the Quake III Arena demo, a dual-processor aware 3D game.

The King of Apple's Power Mac G4's, the DP 1.42 GHz, is no slouch. It really blows away our upgraded Cube at many of the things we like to do, i.e. ripping CDs for our iPod, working with photos and movies and, especially, playing 3D games like Quake III Arena that are dual-processor aware. We can hardly wait to see how the new Power Mac G5 DP 2 GHz compares.