G3 Vrs G4

[Cesar R]

Eventhough there is the same speeds on both model, what is the main difference specially in the notebooks?

[Cesar R]

also, what is this g5 I read about?

 

Should I buy a g4 or wait for something newer and buy a g4 laptop in the mean time?

[Frosty]

Let me preface this with an "I love Macs." I have 3 of them and 3 PCs. I teach with Macs and I fully believe they are a better environment to learn on. I love video editing on them and 2D graphics are awesome. However, I do ALL of my 3D work on a PC. Macs are lagging badly in their ability to do high end 3D work. The work flow and interface is superior on a Mac, not to mention colour sync, but the G4 was a catastrophy. The Altivec unit on the G4 was never able to accelerate 3D rendering. It does rip through video and audio like crazy though.

 

With that said... do not buy a new Mac right now. If you do, I think you might be crying in about a month and a half when the 970s are reportedly being released.

 

Many of my friends and students have iBooks and PowerBooks. They are great little computers and very few people I know have had problems with them - can't say that about the Dell owners.

[Greg Hess]

Mac makes pretty much the best laptops in existence.

 

However I'd also throw in my hat about waiting. Though the "replacement" cpu's won't show up in the notebooks for quite some time, you'll still want to wait for that new 15 inch g4 powerbook.

 

I wouldn't invest in a g3 for anything but basic work. (Word processing, email, surfing).

 

We replaced an entire lab full of G3's (16 machines) with a single athlon. The 1900+ was 60 times faster then a single G3, and now were using 2400+ and faster XP chips. Basically four computers doing the work of an entire building full of G3's.

 

http://paup.csit.fsu.edu/

 

Of course its not cg, but it gives you an idea of the raw power output difference between the two architectures.

 

At least the G4 chips are competitive against third tier pc chips.

[Greg Hess]

http://macnet2.com/more.php?id=338_0_1_0

[garethace]

I doesn't matter how much MAC try to develop their platform saying new chips, new DDR, more DDR,... the fact remains is that MAC are always going to manage to screw up on the chipset end of things anyhow. They can always do that just by themselves without any assistance from anyone else.

 

Okay, so MOTO have lost interest in cpus, so mac can put two cheapo chips designed for the communications industry into a box. No matter how fast the memory MAC uses, the current MOTO chips have not got the logic built into to the front-side-bus part of the cpu to take advantage of faster ram.

 

Read this article and notice the benchmarks for the Athlon - apart for faster cpus it is also to do with the sucess of the chipset. Even the way canterwood is beating granite bay now - it is all about constant improvement.

 

Then and Now: Athlon Platforms Compared

http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030303/index.html

 

However, may do agree that MAC have the stuff to make quite good webserver platforms. Power consumption is lower, and with proper optimised/tweaking written software for the Motorola G3/G4 cpu, one could be on a winner. Sun have been doing this for a while now - stuff with their low volume design - sparc. See what posters have to say here about building a web server - it is not all about fast cpus.

 

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=95035928

 

Intel have Tualatin, and maybe banias soon in web servers, AMD have the Opteron, Via have C3, sun have sparc, but mac do have a good web server cpu in the moto. me thinks. :winkgrin:

[Cesar R]

can't say that about the Dell owners

LOl tell me about it, Thanks for youri input.

[ingo]

In addition to Frosty's comments i had to say that you should also wait to buy a Powerbook. The "old" 15" TiBook will be replaced anytime soon, hopefully with ATI graphics instead of that crappy Nvidia stuff.

The G in G3 - G5 stands simply for generation, so a G4 is the forth generation of the PowerPC.