Okay, by now everybody's heard about the price drops on the Power Mac G3 line, which some Mac sites have been talking about for weeks. Unquestionably, this is a great time to buy a new box-- assuming, of course, that you're willing to forego the coolness factor of the iMac in favor of the expandibility of Apple's more pedestrian offerings. What's particularly interesting to us is seeing just how much each option at the Apple Store has dropped in price-- which is easy, thanks to MacAddict's handy price comparison.

MacAddict's chart reveals just how far Apple Store prices have dropped since March. On top of the $300 reduction on the baseline desktop and $400 off on the baseline minitower, you can save a whopping $460 on the option to upgrade to a 300 MHz processor. Pretty much all other options have also dropped significantly, including RAM, disks, and high-speed networking. These Power Mac price drops are of particular interest to budget-conscious graphics professionals, who need more than an iMac to get their work done, and the perennial oxymoron known as the "serious gamer," who's willing to spend more cash to enhance the immersive game-playing experience.

Remember, no matter how hard Apple pushes the iMac as a great games machine, if the games you're interested in playing are primarily of the 3D variety (which is quite likely, given that genre's overwhelming popularity), you're probably going to want to play them with a 3D accelerator card, which makes hardware-accelerated games look nicer and play faster-- and which you can't use in an iMac. Consider a Power Mac G3/233 desktop machine instead; for $100 more than an iMac, you get a system that includes a standard set of Mac expansion ports (serial, SCSI, ADB) and a floppy drive, plus PCI expansion slots that will let you add in a cheap VooDoo 3D accelerator to enhance games like Myth, Quake, Unreal, and a slew of others. Don't worry about missing the boat on USB, either-- there have already been PCI cards announced that bring USB to Power Mac G3's for about $70. Sure, you still have to shell out for a monitor, but that's the price you pay for expandibility. For Mac gamers, it's hard to beat the $1399 Power Mac G3/233 right now.