> So my question, because I'm seriously considering this, because I like my > Pismo and don't want a TiBook - will this do me any good? I can afford it a > lot more than a new laptop, and I do a lot of things that would work better > with a G4 - Photoshop, OS X, iTunes, iPhoto - and for sure it would beat the > pants off of my 400Mhz G3. But is there a possibility of faster upgrades > downstream?
No one can =say= for sure whether or not there will be faster upgrades down the pike, I would doubt it for a long while (due to architecture/economic reasons) but who knows? A lot of the below is conjecture, but through past history and common sense. Here is the problem with an upgrade like this- the G4 isn't a bad processor, but it is focused. Extremely focused. Especially when you are plugging it into an older architecture, you end up not getting the same speed increase you would if you took a 733mhz G4 and added a dual 1ghz card to it. You have a 400mhz G3, and this would be a 500mhz G4. That is a 25% clock rate increase. You can expect (because you are plugging it into an older architecture) around a 20% speed increase across the board when you factor in the limitations of your drive/bus speeds and video card. Those are basically your points of failure (you can see this in G4 upgrades in older machines): bus speed, drive speed, video speed, etc... Those three things are what can keep performance from being way up there. Lets go through the exact applications you use. photoshop: Don't think you are suddenly going to be using it 50% faster. Most of Pshop is not altivec accelerated (and can't be easily). Some filters are. When you see the big benchmarks saying on average with altivec it can be 30-50% faster, it is because some of the filters benefit drastically and screw up the curve. :) And a lot of the drastically accellerated ones are not the most commonly used (ie, a gaussian blur or unsharp mask doesn't benefit tremendously). Scrolling won't see that much of a benefit due to your video card and other issues, using the application itself will see 20% tops. If you have to sit through long, long filter processing then you could see a big benefit right there. In fact you can see this by going and looking at the benchmarks around between the 400mhz pismo and the 400mhz G4 from old- hardly any increase except in photoshop, etc and that was "batch processing testing". itunes: Yeah, itunes sucks up a crazy amount of resources just playing background music. But most of that is not altivec accelerated whatsoever. Where you can see massive gains with a G4 is in ripping tracks from your G4, types of conversion. But those are dependant on a lot of factors... Ie, will you be ripping from your internal drive? Chances are your G3 is close to saturating the speed of the drive, and the G4 will top out... And your internal hard drive- if it has to wait while it processes stuff to your internal drive... iPhoto: Will definitely help, as a lot of the app is altivec accellerated (things resize faster, catalog viewing, etc) but its not night and day... It can be the difference between frustrating as hell and usable though. OSX: Things will be snappier, such as shadows drawing and others things. But you are so limited by your drive it isn't funny- OSX is constantly using it. I saw hardly any improvement between a 500mhz tibook and a 667 (pre-cache) but putting a 5400rpm drive in showed an across the board improvement. In closing, if it makes sense to you and you are willing to put up with all the potentials (a company that has proven unreliable, untested product, etc) then go for it. Really you have a bunch of ram (one of the main things you can do to improve performance) so about the best thing you could do to see big across the board gains would be to upgrade the internal drive to a 5400rpm model. Anyways, hope it helps. Michael Bryan Bell ------------------ ICQ: 16106263 Yahoo: mhbell1 No Link for you! AIM: drunkenbatman -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
