Intrepid Editor Jonathan Seff takes the new Edu-iMac for a test drive:
The Macworld Lab tested the $899 iMac with our standard suite of tests, and the results were impressive. The composite Speedmark score for all tests was 175, which compared very favorably to the eMac (137) and the MacBook with the same processor (155). The standard 17-inch iMac, however, beat out the education version by more than 15 percent (202).
Processor-intensive tasks such as a Cinema 4D render, iMovie filter, and iTunes MP3 encoding showed huge improvements over the G4-based eMac-71 percent, 43 percent, and 48 percent, respectively-and scores equal to or better than the standard iMac. And playback of HD movie trailers from Apple's Web site was smooth, although I did notice a few stutters when playing clips in iMovie that have several transitions and effects applied to them.
The $899 iMac definitely suffered in 3-D game play-getting 30 fewer frames per second than the standard iMac and only about one half a frame more per second than the eMac-due to its integrated graphics, but that's a sacrifice Apple seems willing to make for a computer meant only for the classroom (and I was able to play Unreal Tournament 2004 and Nanosaur 2 quite enjoyably).
