G4 FBS really a limitation

[Lollypop]

hi

I am yet to switch to a mac so Im rather uneducated. Everyone seems to bitch and moan about the G4 front side bus, is it really that big a problem? I have tried to find benchmarks online but havnt had any luck... What difference for example does a a simmilairly clocked G4 have with different bus speeds? (a 1.33ghz at 133mhz and 167mhz fsb for example)

Thanks!

 

[johnnyjibbs]

Yes the G4s have a pathetic FSB, and yes it is the bottleneck, and yes people do moan about it, but my PB gives me good performance with only a 133MHz FSB (older rev) on a 1GHz G4 processor.

The best thing you can do is go to a shop and try the G4s out for yourself. I don't think the G4s are half as bad as many people on this forum make out so the best thing to do is to try it out for yourself. If you know of an Apple Store near you, try that out as you could test Photoshop and stuff on one. Bear in mind though that demo units tend to be slower than actual new units because lots of people have messed around on them and usually move certain files!

 

[DrBoar]

You will find many that "know" that the FSB is the main bottleneck of the G4 in the mac. But I have yet to find hard evidence that at 1.25 Ghz G4 with a 167 Mhz bus is much faster than a G4 1.2 GHz on a 100 Mhz bus. I do not recall evidence that dual 1.3 GHz G4 suffer on slow FSB.

bearfeats.com showed clearly that a 400 Mhz G3 on a 50 MHz bus slowed down the performance a lot compared to a G3/400 with 100 Mhz bus. But as of now I think the major flaw of the G4 was clock speed not FSB speed.