| Performance | 10 | |
| Setup and Ease of use | 9 | |
| Service and Support | 7 | |
| Features | 8 | |
| Design | 9 | |
| Overall | 9/10 | |
Built on the fearsomely fast PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine — the first supercomputer on a chip — the Macintosh Server G4 with Mac OS X Server is an explosive combination of cutting-edge hardware and software. And whether you plan to use it for a large corporate website, design or publishing firm, higher educational institution or K-12 computer lab, the Macintosh Server G4 with Mac OS X Server is so easy to use that it’s ready to hit the ground running minutes after you plug it in and turn it on. Check out the hardware first. The Macintosh Server G4 comes with 933-MHz or dual 1-GHz PowerPC processors with 256K on-chip L2 cache running at processor speed. Both models feature 2MB DDR SDRAM L3 cache per processor with up to 4GB per second throughput, 133MHz system bus (supports over 1-GBps data throughput), 256MB or 512MB of PC133 SDRAM (expandable up to 1.5GB), four full-length 64-bit, 33-MHz PCI slots, and a 80GB 7200-rpm Ultra ATA hard disk drive — storage capacity enough to serve over a million web pages. You also get three 3.5-inch hard disk drive expansion bays, and one AGP 4X graphics slot (complete with the ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card with 32MB of DDR SDRAM graphics memory). Plus two 400-Mbps FireWire ports, four USB ports, and built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet connector. The hardware and software work together. To cite one example, Mac OS X Server features a high-performance I/O subsystem designed to take full advantage of Gigabit Ethernet in the Macintosh Server G4 — allowing large files to speed across your network. By the way, “software” is an understatement for what’s installed on the Macintosh Server G4. Thanks to its rock-solid UNIX-based core operating system, the next-generation Mac OS X Server has protected memory, preemptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, advanced memory management and tight security. It’s engineered to maximize uptime, with fault tolerance systems that continuously monitor server activity, restart malfunctioning services, detect and recover from system failures — and even automatically restart the server after a power failure. And with a comprehensive suite of directory, file, print, mail, network, application, client management, QuickTime Streaming and Web services — plus an unparalleled degree of control — Mac OS X Server lets you manage your network with textbook precision. Web service is based on Apache, the popular open source HTTP Web server. That means you can host many Web sites on a single server, each with its own address (also known as multilink multihoming), and that you can configure your server to support multiple addresses per Ethernet card (virtual hosting). The Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (or WebDAV) technology integrated into the Apache server’s Web service lets you do drag-and-drop publishing and file sharing from Mac OS X computers. QuickTime Streaming service lets you broadcast streaming video to client computers in real time using an industry-standard streaming protocol. And Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) lets you transfer large files among workgroup members.
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The Lowdown: Built from the ground up to maximize server uptime, the Macintosh Server G4 with Mac OS X Server features fault tolerance systems that continuously monitor server activity, restart malfunctioning services, detect and recover from system failures — and even automatically restart the server after a power failure. As the herald of a new paradigm in Mac networking, OS X Server's NetBoot feature promises to simplify network administration vastly while giving users new freedom from their physical desktops.
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