ibook g3 800 info

[choppers5000]

hello

i would like to buy apple ibook but i not sure which is best for me. i think i would enjoy to buy-

used ibook G3, 800MHz or 900, 256MBram or more, combo, 12 or 14",

however i would like to know if one could play games with these specs? games such as racing games like F1 2003, and also flight simulators?

would an 800 with 256 ram be powerful enough or do i need more ram? what about cache? is the 12" too small or just perfect as i will not play game so much, just on airplane travel adventures, mainly i use to email and web surf and i travel much also but i may like 14 to watch dvd in hotel?

how much is beautiful price for me to pay?

thank-you very much for your help....

 

[dieselg4]

I had a g3 ibook 800, though it was running jag and not panther. It seemed kinda sluggish to me, even with the ram maxed out; also, if you look on places like eBay, smalldog, or even apple's refurds, the prices for these really haven't fallen that much yet. If you buy one used, especially on ebay, you'll prob. have to factor in the $129 dollar cost to get panther, in which case I'd just go buy a new ibook g4, and get ram from someplace else. (Apple sold alot of ibook 800's with a plain old CD-ROM, and you'd prob. want a combo drive - selling a computer w/ just a CD ROM in 2003 is like selling a computer with jsut a floppy drive in 1998, IMHO. Then again, Dell does it all the time wiht they widely advertised $599 notebooks - what a sham!)

I've never been a big game fan, so i can't speak to an ibook's ability for gaming. If you don't want to split for a larger screen, there are some unauthrized hacks for enabling video spanning on ibooks.

 

[hugemullens]

F1 2003 isn't out on the mac. Only championship season 2000, and of note EA has killed the F1 series on the PC with F1 Challenge 99-02, so the only F1 game in the works is Gran Prix 5, PC only. Of note for nascar, unless you get a G5 forget it. 800 DP G4 with radeon 7500 at 1024x768 got no higer than 30fps with most details on medium. My 500 dollar home built PC averages about 40 with everything on high. If you game, buy a PC. Macs dont game, sorry folks, dont hate me. I love the mac, but get it for productivity, not gaming. So if your looking for a great computer, you will love the ibook, its wonderful, OS X rocks, but gaming blows.

 

[cubist]

Some games that don't use a lot of 3D, such as Civ3 and Age of Empires II, and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, will work OK on the iBook 800. Warcraft III probably won't, and most first-person-shooters won't. (You could try running Marathon in Classic.) I think you can probably find a lot of games that are playable, but they won't be the ones people talk about a lot.

I agree with dieselg4, I tried to buy a used iBook a few months ago, and the used prices are too close to the new prices to make it worthwhile. You might find a used 500MHz iBook for $600 or so. There's just too much demand for iBooks. The new iBook G4 800MHz will be much faster, includes a combo drive and Panther, and a warranty, for $1099.