14" iBook vs 12" PB

[MacSwitchMan]

I am newbie to mac . I plan to buy a 12 " PB G4 or a 14" iBook G4 (falls within my price range). I need help deciding which one to buy!

I am right now leaning towards the 12" PB.
I mainily plan to use it for java/python development (for school projects).
While browsing for the laptops I noticed that
ATI Radeon 9200 is offered with iBook
Ge Force go 200 is offered with PB
which one is better with respect to performance? Are they pretty much the same..

Its unlikely that I'd be watching movies or playing computation intensive game on the power mac, so should I even bother with the performace of the graphics card?

The other difference I see between the 14 " & the 12 " is the L2 cache, ibook has 256 Mb and PB - 512 MB. Does this make a noticeable difference in performance of the laptop in general?

Finally heres a question for experienced power book users, which one (12" PB or 14" iBook) on average has a longer battery life and gets less heated?

Finally, I can survive without a laptop for at most 1 more month, do you belive g5 will get released by end of this year or early next year (Jan 2004...)? Should I wait for PowerBook g5 to be released before i purchase, or should I just go ahead with g4?

The answers to these questions will greatly help me buy a mac. Happy thanksgiving!
Thank you all!

 

[QCassidy352]

The radeon 9200 is the better card. however, this does not matter for two reasons:
1) your work doesn't sound like it will make use of the card either way
2) neither of the computers has a fast enough CPU to really feed the graphics card. In other words, the processor is likely to be the limiting factor in a graphics intensive task, not the card.

the cache difference does make a differencec - a big difference. You might check out some average benchmarks for the 12" PB and the 1 Ghz ibook at barefeats.com. The powerbooks score consistently higher than even the fastest ibook.

I don't know about the ibook G4, but I had an ibook G3 14" and the battery life was incredible. I still do OK with my new powerbook 12" - about 3.5-4 hours depending on usage. But my old ibook 14" was better by far. Both put out about the noticable heat (and it's not bad in either case).

I think you will be waiting a lot more than a month for a powerbook G5. I am not expecting them soon.

 

[MacSwitchMan]

Thanks QCassidy352.. That greatly helped

 

[QCassidy352]

happy to be able to help. let us know if u have any more questions/ concerns...

 

[kuyu]

does anyone know a good site for checking graphics card benchmarks? If it's mac only, even better.

Happy holidays world.