Hi I am going to be selling my 17inch imac and was wondering what a 800Mhz G4 is comparable to in the intel world? Just so I can give the guy who is interested some idea of what he is getting.
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Selling... 800MHz G4 is comparable to ___ P4?
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Well, processor performance wise, he is probably getting close to a 1.1 Ghz AMD (some will say more like 1.5Ghz). But considering the relatively slow video card and LCD of the iMac (compared to say a desktop PC of the same vintage as the iMac G4/800 with a CRT and a cutting edge video card from that era), he may be disappointed. It depends what he wants to do with the computer. If he does any real crunching (GarageBand, FinalCut, ProTools, etc. etc.) then he will likely be miffed at the stalls and hiccups. If he only uses it to surf the net, play some iTunes, read email, type some documents, and play some modest video games, he will be fine with the performance.
Yeah... I know the computer is perfect for what he is doing... I just wanted to give him some numbers. But, yeah... he won't be doing final cut or garageband. So, he should be be ok.
Depending on what he's doing (esp. if not using Photoshop), I'd say it's comparable to no better than a p3-800 desktop or so. If hs'e using Safari to surf the net, he'll be rather disappointed.itsbetteronamac said:
I use to have a 700 mhz iMac G4 w/384 megs and I found it UNBEARABLE at work. My PM G4 933 mhz w/512 megs is close to intolerable. FWIW, my main machine at home is only a 1 ghz Athlon w/512 meg and it's more than tolerable. My other work Mac is a PM G5 2 ghz dual w/1 gig of RAM which I find plenty fast.
cwerdna said:
Well... I don't know what your talking about, but I use safari and it is blazing fast. Pages load in like 3 seconds, and nothing really takes over a few seconds in any program. (Not photoshop and stuff though)
Also, I know my computer is faster than a 2.6 Ghz. Celeron, but then again that's a celeron. So, I don't know what you've been doing to your computers, but I'm sorry. Oh, and 384 in a 700 Mhz is actually substantually slower (My friend has one.)
I'm dead serious about what I'm saying. I'm using PowerPoint 11.1 on them and Safari from Panther.itsbetteronamac said:
I sometimes hit issues that are noticeable on the 933 and 700 mhz machines where I can out type Safari when say composing a mail message on gmail.com. I've NEVER encountered this on any PC w/sufficient RAM. Safari in general is just slow (althouh I think there was a bump up in perf w/one of the latest updates to Panther; but that was after I got rid of the iMac 700 mhz). PPT 11.1 on certain slide designs can barely keep up w/my typing on my G4 933 (extremely annoying). PPT 11 for Windows on a 1 ghz Athlon has NO issues whatsoever w/lag.
BTW, not wanting to get into "bench racing" here, but http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232&p=13 kinda validates what I'm saying. He's running a dual proc 2 ghz G5 w/Safari against some unspecified Windows machine running IE.
I'm not saying that all these are necessarily the fault of the machine or indicative of a G4 being fast/slow. Some of I'm sure is the fault of software, but it's not like you can do much about the speed of the app or the OS yourself (unless you have the source code, can figure out what the bottlenecks are and optimize those routines).
cwerdna said:
Safari really is a slow slow slow browser. Starting to get off topic, but I used Safari almost exclusively at first on my iBook G4 800. It felt fine, especially since I was only comparing it to Opera 7 and 8. Opera takes forever to load on a mac, and feels slower than the same thing on a P3-500. I started using Camino lately, and the difference is very noticeable. (Firefox too, but I like the look of Camino better.) Certain sites, like ebay are especially slow in Safari. Even though there are some issues with compatibility with certain sites and plug-ins, my everyday browsing experience is better under Camino.
Powerpoint can also get painful on this machine, and I avoid it when I can, but work sometimes makes it necessary to fire it up.
To get somewhat back on topic, it doesn't make sense to ask what P4 is equivalent to a G4 800. It all depends on the apps you use. If you stay away from Safari and Powerpoint and open up Camino and Keynote instead, you'll feel like you have a much faster machine. Before I got my iBook, I was happy on my P266 Vaio, which was painful to run MSIE on but felt almost modern using 6.
OK, now I know what you are talking about. Yeah, I agree with you, safari is slow at typing and so is powerpoint, and in fact even sometimes word. But, this is on most macs. Really the only time I havn't noticed this is on mac running at 1.5 ghz+ and having more than 512mb ram. So... I am not going to be worring about this since I am getting a new powerbook, but yeah. But, I am not really worried about this, because once I clear everything out, and doing a fresh install, it wil be plenty speedy. 
Bizarro. What are you running that feels so much faster? As I stated, my experience is the total opposite. Even if I use Firefox on the Quicksilver vs. my 1 ghz Athlon at home, I still feel the Quicksilver is slower.ITASOR said:
The only ideas I can think of for your case are some or all of the following:
- not enough RAM (256 megs running WinXP doesn't cut it)
- misconfigured hw (like hardware conflicts, wrong RAM timings, underclocking) causing system hiccups
- VERY badly fragmented and very slow hard drive (maybe w/DMA turned off)
- using the wrong video driver (like the Windows generic VGA drivers instead of the one for your chipset/video card)
- bad hard drive causing system hiccups
- some other process possibly even a virus or malware chewing up CPU time
- CPU overheating causing it to throttle itself down
One area that I will say G4 and G5 [partly due to the use of Altivec] blow the doors off of x86 chips is on distributed.net RC5-72 client although it's a very poor benchmark for CPU perf (http://faq.distributed.net/cache/55.html). Here are some stats for my machines (some are at work, some are home):
G5 2 ghz dual: ~18 w/power settings=auto; 24-28 w/power=highest [but fans usually get super loud or speed up and slow down]
G4 933: ~9.7 million keys/sec
P4 3 ghz: ~5.3
Athlon 1 ghz: ~2.8