ibook and CS2 vs P4

[xalia]

I am really happy with my ibook, and I upgraded with an extra 512 ram. Now my girlfirend is also thinking of getting one. She is a graphic designer working a lot with the CS2 , especially the illustrator. She has a 19” TFT so the plan is to have the ibook 12” on the road and plug it to the 19” on home.
Right now she owns a P4 at 2.5 with 1 gigabyte of ram. Will there be any difference on performance with the mac? Better? Worst? What do you think?

 

[captainbeefheat]

the problem with the 19 inch screen is that the max resolutions an ibook can run in is 1024 x 768 even if you plug a large monitor in, it will still be that size. Your probably better to get a PB think they all allow larger resolutions.

 

[xalia]

what about the performance in comparison with the pc?

 

[dav]

Not True

 

[oingoboingo]

I am really happy with my ibook, and I upgraded with an extra 512 ram. Now my girlfirend is also thinking of getting one. She is a graphic designer working a lot with the CS2 , especially the illustrator. She has a 19” TFT so the plan is to have the ibook 12” on the road and plug it to the 19” on home.
Right now she owns a P4 at 2.5 with 1 gigabyte of ram. Will there be any difference on performance with the mac? Better? Worst? What do you think?

OK this is a really wonky reply to your question, but there's a long running thread over on the Arstechnica discussion boards about the PSBench7 benchmark test. They have results for many different machine configurations over there. Obviously the test is only for a suite of Photoshop actions (not Illustrator), and is for the old version 7, not CS2. However, it should give you a rough idea of how different machines compare to each other.

Anyway...to the scores. I tried to find machines that people have tested that are close to what you are talking about. The PSBench7 score for a 1.33GHz 17" PowerBook G4 is 240. The score for a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 is 269. For comparison, a dual 2GHz PowerMac G5 scores 525.

Place as much or as little faith in those results as you like. It looks like the G4 processor is still somewhat competitive with low end Pentium 4 chips, at least in the Photoshop 7 benchmark suite.

The entire thread is here:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/48409524/m/121008259631/p/1

Before anyone yells at me, yes I realise this is a very imperfect test. But comprehensive cross-platform benchmarks directly comparing a recent model iBook and a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 are somewhat lacking on the net

 

[xalia]

Her main complain is that she cannot handle easily large files on the pc. She is tired of getting the not enough memory on windows! Will this be still an issue on a mac? The 240 vs 269 isn't a big difference.

 

[oingoboingo]

Her main complain is that she cannot handle easily large files on the pc. She is tired of getting the not enough memory on windows! Will this be still an issue on a mac? The 240 vs 269 isn't a big difference.

If she's constantly getting the 'not enough memory' error on her Windows machine, why doesn't she add some more RAM? Memory for desktop systems is quite cheap. An extra 512MB or 1GB of RAM won't break the bank.

If RAM is really a limiting factor for the way your girlfriend works, then an iBook perhaps won't be the best choice. It has a maximum RAM limit of 1.5GB (and that's using an expensive 1GB SO-DIMM), and the standard hard drive is only a 4200rpm unit. This means that swapping memory to and from the hard drive is going to be slow.

 

[xalia]

She had 512 and I upgraded to 1g. I think that MacOs handles better ram than windows so the ibook with the a memory upgrade will do the trick. To conclude if the performance of the ibook is the same or slightly better than her current pc, she is willing to get the ibook.

 

[oingoboingo]

She had 512 and I upgraded to 1g. I think that MacOs handles better ram than windows so the ibook with the a memory upgrade will do the trick. To conclude if the performance of the ibook is the same or slightly better than her current pc, she is willing to get the ibook.

I suppose the safest way to see how the iBook is going to handle those large Photoshop jobs is to try out some of the images she works with on your own iBook. Have you tried this experiment out? It might also be worthwhile testing out how your iBook handles spanning the desktop across an external 19" display running at high resolution (you'll have to apply the screen spanning hack mentioned previously in this thread though). Remember there's still only 32MB of VRAM in the iBook, even though the GPU got upgraded to a Radeon 9550.

Let us know how you go.