I am looking to upgrade my sawtooth G4 500 and am looking at the dual 800mhz, and the single ghz. I dont do photoshop, but I do use many apps at once. I also play games. I am leaning towards the dual 800 mainly because it will do nicely when I have lots of apps open, and have backlight running the screen saver in the background. But the games (except the few SMP enabled ones) will benefit from the faster 1ghz processor. The single processor is cheaper. I am torn about this. What games are optimized for multi cpus besides quake? I play warcraft, and I can barely play during large battles. Is 800mhz good enough to have relatively smooth battles (at least enough for me to see the mouse cursor to do spells, im not asking for a miracle)
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G4 Sawtooth Processor upgrade dual 800mhz vs single ghz?
- Thread starter WannabeSQ
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agreed. osx makes great use of my dual 500s.
when i moved to osx, i simultaneously imported 15k emails (incl. attachments) into Mail.app and volume smoothed 3k mp3s in iTunes.
it took a heck of a long time to do it all, but by watching CPU meter and Top i could see it kept the processors 99% busy the whole time.
i was impressed.
when i moved to osx, i simultaneously imported 15k emails (incl. attachments) into Mail.app and volume smoothed 3k mp3s in iTunes.
it took a heck of a long time to do it all, but by watching CPU meter and Top i could see it kept the processors 99% busy the whole time.
i was impressed.
Thanks for the replies, and I do know about OSX's abilities to utilize both cpus well, but I am looking more into gaming performance. Will most games be SMP aware? I know ID makes theirs so, and Quake3 engine based games should (provided they get it to work properly) make good use of it. Im kinda hoping Doom 3 will come out for Mac, and that this upgrade will give me playable performance. Thats all I ask, is playable, im not expecting a miracle here, if I wanted better performance, id spend the $800 on an Athlon box. But then id have to deal with windows (bleh) already got a windoze laptop for that.
They're supposed to have Dual GHz upgrades coming out soon (if they're not out already). But for what you'd spend, you could almost buy a new Dualie with DDR, etc. Have you considered waiting a little, keeping what you've got for now, and saving up to buy a new machine or better upgrade. You can always sell your 500 on eBay, or trade it in at someplace like www.powermax.com when you buy new or refurb.
In the meantime you can upgrade your video card to a 64 MB Radeon for ~$150.
edit: INVADER ZIM ROCKS.
Sorry, I'm okay now. Damn Nickelodean. And those stupid Sumos.
In the meantime you can upgrade your video card to a 64 MB Radeon for ~$150.
edit: INVADER ZIM ROCKS.
Sorry, I'm okay now. Damn Nickelodean. And those stupid Sumos.
already got the radeon
I think i will wait until after Macworld. I am pretty fine with the speed I have now, its just games, and i just switched to OSX, which sadly is not as fast as OS9, but it is way cooler. Ive seen the benchmarks for the new ones, and am not impressed, if I could, id get the quicksilver dual ghz. I dont think ill be able to afford more than a dual ghz any time soon, but I am hoping that if something new comes out at MW, the old stuff will be cheaper. Another reason id like either the upgrade or the quicksilver is the 2mb cache, and when I do audio work, that cache can double performance related to special effect processing. I guess ill wait to see some more benchmarks.
Quake III itself just zooms on my dual 800, maxed out with memory. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is quite smooth. I haven't noticed other games using the Q3 engine, such as Star Trek: Elite Force working amazingly quicker, the way that Q3 itself does.