News for Thursday, 2 November 2006

AMD has published online a dedicated webpage entitled: A power pack for your Power Mac: Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition. This card targets high-end users, and has been designed exclusively for PCI Express-based Power Mac® G5 systems.
This card must be very similar to the one available as BTO or retail for the Mac Pro when ordering from AppleStore.
AMD did not provide any information regarding the price of this card, but according to a xlr8 reader it should be around 350$ (instead of 400$/Euro for the BTO on the AppleStore.
Hardware specifications are as follow:

System Requirements
Apple Power Mac® G5 PCI Express based® system
512MB of system memory
Graphic Features
Radeon® X1900 GT graphics processing unit
Memory Configuration
256MB GDDR3 memory
256-bit memory interface
Operating System Support
Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher
Display Support
Dual integrated dual-link DVI for high-resolution digital displays
VGA mode support on DVI outputs (with adapter)
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
Connectors
Two dual-link DVI-I
9-pin S-video and composite video output
VGA support through adapter
Display Modes
Digital Displays (Connected by DVI)
All Resolutions up to 2560x1600
Analog Displays (Connected by VGA)
All resolutions up to 2048x1536
TV-out
SDTV (analog): 480i | 525i
HDTV (analog or digital): 480p | 720p | 1080i | Any custom resolution1

The website 123macmini, has published a very nice mod: a Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 GHz in a Power Mac G4 Cube! It is not only esthetically nice, it allows the use of a faster and cheaper 3.5" HD instead of the default 2.5" found with Mac mini.
The other of this transformation has been inspired by the New York Apple Store Cube. The result is beautiful:

Direct link to the article: 123macmini.com
If you have performed such transformation or mod, please do not hesitate to post them in the dedicated category on our forum: "In mods we trust"

Apple has released a new version of X11, taking advantages of Tiger. It fixes bugs while improving graphical rendering (such as stereo visual used for 3D rendering with special glasses). This update should be available soon via the software update panel (50MB), or immediately from Apple download website.

This update addresses several issues in the X11 for Mac OS X package, enabling it to better handle:
GLX stereo visuals
offscreen rendering to GLX Pbuffers and Pixmaps
To tell X11 to take advantage of stereo visuals, enter:
$ defaults write com.apple.x11 enable_stereo -bool true

If you are using X11-based application let us know in our forum (here) if you have noticed improvements (performance, displays, etc.)