Its been a few weeks since the launch of the new G5s. The PCIe ones with the Dual Core CPUs. In case you don't know about it yet, these new Macs have expansion card slots called PCIe which is different from the slots that earlier macs used - called PCI and PCI-X. And different means that if you have a Mac with PCI cards line Blackmagic, Kona, or even plain Firewire or some other card, you can't put them into a new Mac G5.
So what are the cards available so far with the new Mac G5. PCIe cards that is?
1. Firewire cards - Aaxeon
2. Video capture cards - Kona 3 from AJA
nothing from BlackMagic or Aurora yet (18 Jan 06)
3. SATA cards - RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express SATA II adapter
4. SCSI cards - none
5. Fibre Channel cards - Apple
6. Ethernet Cards - none (why, the new G5 has 2 GigE ports)
So really, not a very wide choice, but not really a show-stopper. So go ahead and get that G5 Dual Cure. Maybe this is the last Mac G5 ever.
And I just checked. The new MacBook Pro (Intel laptop from Apple) does not have a PCMCIA or PC-Card or CardBus slot. It does have an ExpressCard slot. This is not compatible with your PC-cards. So if you have some of those, time to look for an ExpressCard version.
On the flip side this ExpressCard will be a faster serial bus -PCIe. So expect some innovative new cards like memory, video I/O, hard disks, flash readers etc.
And fianally even if, at first sight, many experts opined that these new Intel Macs won't run Windows because there's no BIOS or something, on second thoughts, opinions are emerging that it might just be possible to run Windows on a Mac. Why would you want to do that? To have the best of both worlds, I guess. Let's wait and see.
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