Is the G5 really the fastest?

Popular Mechanics decided to investigate Apple's claims that the G5 PowerMac was the world's fastest personal computer, but found out it was a lot trickier than they expected (Apple actually was forced to rescind those claims by the Independent Television Commission in the UK). Besides not being able to get the same exact kinds of Macs and PCs that were used by VeriTest for their comparison, they also weren't able to get VeriTest to give them any of the special configuration files used for running the benchmarks run on OS X. They did end up running some other tests and found that the G5 was in fact faster than the dual-processor PC they tested from HP, though they argue that ultimately these sorts of tests are meaningless for most people since a computer's performance is determined by lot of things besides just its processor speed.