Mac Speeds

I would like to get a mac, I have not had one in about 15 years, last time I had one it was a Mac SE with 2.5mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive, at the time it was awesome!! I think System 7 had just came out also at the time.

Anyways, now its time to get a mac to play around with and learn. But the speeds have me confused. I am looking for something used and cheap, but still a little fast, I hate really slow.. What would a G4 733mhz be equalevilent in PC world.. like P4 2.4ghz? AMD Athlon XP speeds? Is a G4 733mhz a decent system still? Reason I ask is they seem to go for semi reasonable price on ebay, 200-350 dollars... The couple hundred dollar range is all I can afford atm.

thanks for any input.

 

well I know you can't compare mhz to mhz, I just do not have the knowledge of what mac speeds mean, like I know in the pc world. take a 2ghz athlon 64 x2 cpu, that will eat a p4 running at 3.6ghz up. So I know mhz is not everything, but when you are talking a g4 at 733mhz and a g5 at 1.8ghz.. thats a large difference, and talking the same platform (like going from a p3 1ghz to a p4 2.8ghz, the p4 is much much faster).

will a g4 733 run the latest mac os, with latest applications quickly still (lets say 512mb of ram)? Or is it quite dated and the couple hundred dollars spent on it would be better used towards a newer faster system?