Happy B-day... but where's the 20th Ann. iMac?! - Page 2

Macaholic · Jan 26th, 2004, 10:58 AM

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	Apple did release a dual 1.42 G4 PowerMac MDD before the G5 was launched.

You're right. Thanks for reminding me. The fact that Apple scaled back the G4 Powermacs suggests to me that they cannot depend on Motorola producing a sufficient amount at that speed. In light of the [b[IBM[/b] G5, I'm sure Moto has killed any further development of G4 processors. Maybe IBM will advance the G4 along, now that they're doing them... but I wouldn't hold my breath for significant improvements.

	Quote:
	Also, 1GHz G4 is dog-slow in my opinion. I'm crawling along at 867, and have performance overhead issues with iDVD, iMovie, GarageBand, and especially games. Buying a G4-anything at this point in time is, IMHO, a mistake.

Certainly buying a NEW G4 could be a mistake in some situations. Like, they still serve well and will continue to do so for quite a while. But, I'd choose carefully. DDR bottlenecks, slow bus speed, single processor compatibility in some apps (versus REALLY utilizing the DUALs in many G4 Powermacs). Some Powermacs have three RAM slots, etc.

As I cannot afford a dual G5 at the moment, and that I already have my Sawtooth upgraded a fair bit (maxed RAM, ATI 9000 Pro, lotsa drives), I've decided to hang on with a dual 1.2GHz G4 processor upgrade. barring the 100MHz FSB and 2X AGP, it should serve me almost as well as most used Powermacs out there.

Strongblade · Jan 26th, 2004, 11:50 AM

Slow at 1GHz?!?

Oh yeah, well, my G4/450 Sawtooth will kick all yer butts! And with one USB port tied behind it's BACK!

Of course, it can't run Halo... But it will still whup all yer sorry keisters!

Kids today... Man, when I was your age, we didn't even have HARD DRIVES!. Floppies were really floppy and 1MB of RAM was OVERKILL!

[img]tongue.gif[/img]

Macaholic · Jan 26th, 2004, 07:07 PM

LOL Strongblade

I too have a Sawtooth with delusions of grandeur! I have installed a CDRW, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, and have both another gig of RAm to add to the gig I got and a dual 1.2GHz G4 processor on its way up from otherworld Computing

It should fly! The February 2004 issue of Mac Addict has a big section on upgrading Macs. They ran Photoshop tests on a stock Sawtooth 400 against a dual 800 Quicksilver, a dual 1.42 MDD G4 and a dual 2GHz G5 -- all with 1GB of RAM. Now, their chart's timings are graduated in 50 second intervals, so it's difficult to be exact about this, but the stock Sawtooth took 65 seconds, the Sawtooth with a 550MHz upgrade took 53, and a 1.4GHz upgrade took about 33 -- as did the Quicksilver. The MDD took about 22 seconds and the G5 took about 14 seconds.

Given this, I'm hoping that my dual 1.2 -- when handling apps that are dual processor aware (like Logic Audio which I use for my work) -- will better a dual 1GHz G4. Certainly i should better a dual 800 Quicksilver (which can only take 1.5GB of RAM and the Sawtooth can take 2GB).

BTW, at this sizes of Photoshop files used (10, 25 and 50MB), they saw no increase in performance on any system when using more than 1GB of RAM. Other tests I've seen using larger files on a G5 with up to 8GB RAM did show significant improvements, however. YMMV.