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15" g4 1ghz vs 12" g4 1ghz
- Thread starter carbonmotion
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There should be no difference between the 1 Ghz 12-inch and the 1 Ghz 15-inch.
But also note that the 15-inch has a faster system bus and faster memory architecture, not to mention a better GPU. If I were you, I'd go for the 15-inch and get the goodies: much better and wider LCD, PC Card slot, FireWire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, and the sense of "balance".
I've checked the Apple Store here in GA and noticed that the screen on the 12-inch really sucks; it uses the exact same screen as the cheaper iBook G4...... -.-
But also note that the 15-inch has a faster system bus and faster memory architecture, not to mention a better GPU. If I were you, I'd go for the 15-inch and get the goodies: much better and wider LCD, PC Card slot, FireWire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, and the sense of "balance".
I've checked the Apple Store here in GA and noticed that the screen on the 12-inch really sucks; it uses the exact same screen as the cheaper iBook G4...... -.-
Yes,
The ram on the 15 uses a faster bus speed. So it should be a little bit faster in that respect.
Also, you get a lot more features on the 15 that you cannot get on the 12. For the extra $350 (assuming you have a 60gig Hard Drive in both- that's the smallest you can get in the 15) you get gigabit ethernet, firewire 800, S-video out, DVI out without a adapter, a PC card slot, two slots for ram (supporting 2gigs as opposed to 1.25gigs), the option of a backlit keyboard ($) and the obviously bigger/higher res screen.
None of this is available on the 12.
The ram on the 15 uses a faster bus speed. So it should be a little bit faster in that respect.
Also, you get a lot more features on the 15 that you cannot get on the 12. For the extra $350 (assuming you have a 60gig Hard Drive in both- that's the smallest you can get in the 15) you get gigabit ethernet, firewire 800, S-video out, DVI out without a adapter, a PC card slot, two slots for ram (supporting 2gigs as opposed to 1.25gigs), the option of a backlit keyboard ($) and the obviously bigger/higher res screen.
None of this is available on the 12.
The 12" Powerbook has twice the L2 Cache of the iBook so yes it will perform faster in quite a few tasks since the System Bus is quite the bottle neck on the G4 systems.
The 12" Powerbook feels like a slouch and so does the 15" until you take in account the hard drive speeds. If you are doing tasks that can be loaded into memory they run fine. Adding memory to these machines really really speeds them up. If you need the machine to work even faster I suggest getting an external drive. This way when you need the extra speed you can use the drive at home or at the office where you have a power connection. Meanwhile you still have your pokey internal power saving drive inside. Another thing that makes a big difference in perceived performance is when you don't care about battery life is to turn off drive sleeping and to set cpu performance to max.
The 12" Powerbook feels like a slouch and so does the 15" until you take in account the hard drive speeds. If you are doing tasks that can be loaded into memory they run fine. Adding memory to these machines really really speeds them up. If you need the machine to work even faster I suggest getting an external drive. This way when you need the extra speed you can use the drive at home or at the office where you have a power connection. Meanwhile you still have your pokey internal power saving drive inside. Another thing that makes a big difference in perceived performance is when you don't care about battery life is to turn off drive sleeping and to set cpu performance to max.
Note that the new 12" PB (1GHz) has 256MB built-in RAM with an empty slot, which is better because you can (realistically) max out at 768MB instead of 640MB when buying a 512MB module. It was the rev A 12" PB that had 128 soldered on and 128 in the slot. Note that the new iBooks still have only 128 in the slot and a RAM ceiling of 640MB instead of 768.
Just another difference between the 12" PB and the iBook...
The extra 33MHz of front side bus speed to the CPU will help in a 15" G4, but the faster RAM won't make any difference. G4s can't be hooked up to a DDR front side bus, so the amount of bandwidth available to the CPU is always going to be less than that between the memory bus and the rest of the system (be it a DDR266 or DDR333 memory bus). In other words, the front side bus speed in a G4 system is always going to be the bottleneck, rather than RAM speeds.
Lack of front side bus scaling has been killing the G4 for years. That's just one of the reasons the FSB in the G5 is so exciting (starting at 800MHz, and going up to 1GHz). It can actually take advantage of a fast memory subsystem (like the dual channel DDR400 in the high end G5s).
Your correct about the FSB being the bottleneck but the faster RAM did increase the speed of the Powermacs about 10-20% overall when it was added. This is because of Apples implementation of DMA (Direct Memory Access). It allows all system hardware components to stream directly to RAM bypassing the CPU. This allows a video card to access the hard drive or the RAM directly and thus benefit from the DDR Ram.