In short buy one if you need one now, its a workhorse and upgradable to 4GB of RAM, its super fast for any creative work - illustration, design, video editing, but anything else and you might want to reconsider which mac you purchase, the step down is the new iMac, fast and stable, great for light-middle design work but also has an Intel processor allowign the running of Mac OS X and Windows XP on it, something PowerMacs currently do not facilitate.
A word of warning, the current PowerMacs have PowerPC chips in as opposed to Intel, Apple are currently upgrading thier product range to Intel chips and PowerMacs appear to be the last of the range to get upgraded. The obvious benefits of Intel Macs are enhanced speed, but more importantly for consumers loking to move from Windows to Mac OS X, the Intel PowerMacs will support BOTH Operating Systems, and might make the transition painless, the current PowerMac only runs Mac OS X. If you need a fast Mac now with windows, look at the recently launched iMac or MacBook Pro.
They have 64-bit processors (generally faster than 'current' standard computers), dual screen graphics card outputs (allowing for 2 monitors to be connected if you wish), firewire 400 and 800 (a dying connection now but good for old ipods and fast external devices), 3 USB 2.0 ports (absolute standard external device connection interface) and a network card (for connecting to your own LAN or via cable to the internet) as standard.
It comes in varying processor speeds although its quite difficult to compare PowerMac G5 processor speeds to anything else, for many reasons, they run a different Operating System (not Windows) and the chips are now standard, they are IBM power PC chips. The speeds range from 1.8Ghz through to Quad 2.7Ghz, for a significant investment I would recommend the Duel 2Ghz model, as its price point out of them all is most favourable.
They are a bit bigger than a standard PC Tower and can be noisy sometimes, although considering there are 9 fans its alot quieter than you would expect.
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Range of Extra Features
Excellent
Instruction manual
Very useful
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