So i’m in the market for a new (or used) apple box, having lots of fun picking colors and screens and whatnot, but I still can’t decipher their crazy processors and speeds.
Basically I’ve been a pc person all my life and so don’t understand how fast a ‘450 mgz g3’ really is.
I want my new/used apple to be able to do the following smoothly: fullscreen mpeg/divx playback, mp3 music, websurfing/shockwave.
Relitively minimal. I currently have a p3 500 and find its fast enough for those things, but I think its time to think different.
Can’t back this up, but I’m almost positive that a G3 450 would be somewhat faster than a Pentium III 500 for those purposes. Regardless, I doubt you would be too disappointed with a current G3 Mac.
G4’s add some nice heft, if you are interested in increased performance.
I use a Double Processor G4 450 and it is plenty fast for Photoshop, DVD, surfing, what have you. Major reason I haven’t upgraded in the last few years is that I just don’t need to. As for a comparison that is super unscientific, my current Mac runs SETI@Home modules faster than my single processor DELL Pentium IV 1.7 GHz computer. Make of that what you will.
But with most current Macs and PCs the performance is more than adequate for most purposes. Gaming would be the most stressful, but that is more related to Graphic Cards these days.
The downside of a Mac G3 is that it is not optimized to run OS X. So using it on an iBook for instance can be a little slower than on a PowerBook of equal MHz.
I agree. That said, however, I have an iBook 700MHz and it’s still pretty darn speedy with OSX 10.2 server. So, get a fast enough G3 and I think you’ll be happy with the performance.
I’m not sure if this is particularly germane, but here’s an analogy pulled from a rather lengthy article if you’re wondering about differences in chip design.
I remember when the G3 chips had first come out. I remember being able to run the distributed.net client on a co-worker’s early G3 (333? 350? it was one of the first IMacs) and having it perform decryption faster than a 450 MHZ PII. This encryption, BTW, was being run IN EMULATION of Windows on the Imac.
Bear in mind, cross-platform, cross-architecture emulation is normally SLOW as molasses.
That blew my socks off. Per MHZ, the G3 chips were definitely faster than a PC of that era.
Oh yeah, when the G3 was new it blew the doors off the Pentia of the same era.
Later, they got faster, while the G3 and G4 stayed virtually still between 400 MHz and 600 MHz for an annoyingly long time.
General rule of thumb is that a G3 = equiv P4 of MHz * 1.75 except slower than that on certain multimedia functions and not as good in a multiprocessor environment; G4 = P4 MHz * 1.75 except somewhat faster on the same multimedia functions and no apologies in a multiprocessor environment.