Darcy,
Everything else being equal, a faster processor will definitely make much more of a difference than a faster video card. In OS X, if you have less than 256 MB of physical RAM, you probably want to get yourself at least up to that level to minimize virtual memory use.
I have 384 MB at school and 512 at work.
But I'm confused about your statement that these G4s have a Rage Pro, since the G4s always shipped with a Rage 128, at minimum -- unless of course they aren't "real" G4s, but beige machines that have had their processors upgraded.It's a real G4. Perhaps I listed it wrong. According to Apple System Profiler, the "Card name" is "ATY, Rage128Pd" and the "Card Model" is "ATY, Rage 128Pro." It's in the AGP slot. It's all greek to me.
If that's the case I would recommend putting a Radeon 7000 PCI in both machines. OS X support for the Rage Pro is dodgy at best, and 2D acceleration is often not supported. If you are mistaken about the type of video card you have -- if you have a real G4 with a Rage 128 or better -- than you won't see much improvement in 2D performance between the Rage 128 and the Radeon 7000, although the image quality is much better, IMO. (The main reason to get one of these cards is 3D performance -- the Radeon 7000 is over three times faster than the Rage 128.) Finally, if you have a real G4 with an AGP slot for the graphics card (the AGP slot was introduced with the second generation of G4s) and your current video card has less than 32 MB of VRAM, you should *definitely* upgrade to a Radeon 9000 AGP so you can take advantage of Quartz Extreme.I can't answer the above because I don' really know what I have. The 9000 costs twice that of the 7000; there's that much difference?
I don't need second monitor support, and I don't do a thing with 3D. What I want is faster redraws (in Finale and in photo editing software). Also, is Quartz Extreme that incredible? Going from OS 9 to Quartz in OS X was very nice; Q Extreme is yet another jump in beauty and readability?
Thanks for your response, and sorry to the list for this personal help session; I tried emailing Darcy directly and it came back to me because my message was perceived as spam. (??)
Andrew Levin
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