Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: DDR is in
Originally posted by SPG
What kind of multimedia stuff are you doing that is being bogged down by a 66 bus? You've used up all your PCI slots? I don't know about this 200gig drive, but 120gig IDE 7200's are about $150ea, and I've got three HD's in one of my machines.
Everyone wants the best machine they can get, and especially the best machine for the money, but let's face it...the current crop of G4's (and even the older G4's) are still really good and immensely capable multimedia machines. I still do most of my DVD and edit work on a G4 450. Hell I still have a G3 based Media 100 that chugs along quite nicely.
Not much of a reason to upgrade a 450 yet, but hopefully we'll see something next month.
I'll admit it, most of it's just principal. But some of it's real world. Not all of us play games on our computers. That wasn't a knock at you, or those who do, I was referring to comments I've heard and don't really get about why people don't buy Macs (buy a PS2 if you wanna play games. $199). Western Digital just announced 200 GB drives, only available on ATA/133. And Maxtor has those 160 GB drives, but they're only 5400 RPM. There's a small, but noticable, performance hit. It's all about the Latency.
If I buy a new Tower, I'd add a RT-Video PCI card, second Monitor (ATI Radeon 7000 PCI, with TV-Out), possibly SCSI card, sound card (wanted a SBLive, but without X drivers, no way. There are other options), as well as future upgrades. Like a dual USB 2/FW2 card when they're available, for compatiblity (although they could just add USB 2, too). You should see my PC. Loaded to the gills, and I'm still having to open it to add and remove stuff. At least it'd be easier on a QS-like Tower.
I'm looking to keep this new future computer for awhile, and will probably be an early adopter of Serial ATA when it comes out anyway, so I hate to bother with an $80 card now. I might just go with dual 120 GBs in the mean time (hopefully the Towers will have them as an option, the xServe does).
If they could have a Radeon 8500 as a CTO option, I wouldn't need another card for TV-Out. I might not need SCSI (we'll see). And if analog audio-in was an option, I could live without a PCI sound card. I probably won't be doing MIDI in anyway, but it's always nice to have options.
I know most drives don't saturate an ATA/66 bus, but ATA/100 seems to be faster. At least in my informal tests, and I've seen benchmarks that prove this on PC sites. Of course different ATA/100 cards were different speeds, so it depends on a lot of factors. But come on, doesn't it look better (especially to PC weenies)? And how much more could it cost? Less than GBEthernet I'm sure. Future proofing. Even with ATA/100, you can't have drives above 128 GBs. Do you know how much room Un-Compressed DV takes up? I can't afford Multi-RAID Ultra 160 SCSI 181 GB drives, and external drives are cumbersome.
You can see my predicament.
Don't get me wrong, I still love my Performa 6400. It was my first computer. "It'll always have a special place in my heart". Heh. But I hate my POS PCs (selling all but 1) and when I move, I want something nice (can't wait to use FCP 3). They won't have to do too much to impress me now-a-days.
1.2 GHz+, DDR (it helps, even bastardized. Trust me), ATA/133 (I guess 100 provides enough bandwidth, but hardware RAID 133 would blow me away), USB 2 (and FW 2, but who we kiddin'), LOTS of PCI slots, TV-Out (as an option at least), analog audio-in, etc. would make me very happy.
Don't make me go back to Win98, PLEASE for the love of humanity. Even Win2000 kinda sux.
"DLL error from an application you've long since uninstalled. Your computer will now shut down for no reason. Cannot shut down computer, program to shut down computer has shut down. Please restart your computer. Cannot restart, Internet Explorer has caused an invalid page fault in something you couldn't understand no matter how many classes you take, which is funny because you weren't even running IE, but for some horrible reason it's tied in to every facet of this OS shell built on a buggy DOS system that sucked in the first place. Trying to fix registry error, could not fix error because there is an error in your registry. Please quit application you already tried to quit".
Blue Screen. "Shutting Down Windows". Frozen computer. Fizzle, fizzle.
"You're Screwed".
