Apple launches dual Power Macs with liquid cooling

But the firm is claiming that the Power Macs, which use chips clocked at 1.8GHz, 2GHz and 2.5GHz still thrash the pants off Pentium 4 and AMD based systems.

The basis for this claim are Photoshop benchmarks using the new machines compared with X86 boxes such as the Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 3.4GHz Pentium 4s and the Alienware Aurora 2.5GHz Athlon 64 FX53.

The graph it uses on its web site, here, isn't exactly the clearest comparison we've seen.

AMD Zone claims that Apple is failing to meet its performance targets while it doesn't compare the system to Opterons, which it says can reach 2.5GHz with air cooling, easily.

Apple claims that the tower Powers run Photoshop nearly twice as fast as P4 based system. Systems start at $2,000. µ