On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 13:07 +0800, Andrew Schox wrote: > Hi all, > > Can anyone give me a subjective (or objective for that matter) > opinion on the sort of performance boost I'd get from going from an > 800MHz G3 iBook to a 1.33GHz G4? There's 500MB RAM in the old one, > and I'd probably do the same in the new one.
In a word - lots, though how much and what will depend on what you do. I'm hardly a Mac expert, but I do use them a bit at work and I have quite a lot of experience with hardware changes in general. >From my experience with mac and non-mac gear, your biggest gains will probably be from disk. The 7200 RPM 3.5" hard disk in the G4 should be a *lot* faster than your PowerBook's 5400RPM or 4200RPM disk. Disk performance makes a big difference for many tasks, and seems to be a major factor - perhaps the biggest - in boot speed and the speed with which many apps load. Consider upgrading the disk in the G4 to a nice modern disk (they're cheap, too) for more capacity and even more speed. Unfortunately, G4s take older PC100/PC133 RAM that's getting expensive now. 512MB should be OK, but I'd want more for Mac OS X personally. A fast disk will help offset slower RAM by making small amounts of swapping and a smaller disk cache slow things down less. I don't know how much the CPU will affect things. I wouldn't expect orders of magnitude, but 2x is entirely possible for CPU intensive tasks. It depends on how cut down the mobile G4s are. How much this affects you in real world use depends on what your workload is like. The other big factor to consider is your video hardware. With Mac OS X, video hardware is important. This is actually true of all OSes, it's just more obvious with Mac OS X. Anyway, if your new G4 has significantly superior video hardware you may see considerable gains in UI snappyness, etc. P.S: If that powerbook's for sale... I actually am looking for an affordable Mac PowerBook or iBook that'll run Mac OS X. I need a box to test Scribus on under Mac OS X. I'm not buying a new one just for development work when they're going to Intel soon anyway - I'll hopefully be able to use Mac-on-Linux on my desktop then, buy a developer edition of OS/X if they release one, or something like that. -- Craig Ringer
