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Older computers usable today
- Thread starter Project Alice
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The following are the best computers to use today:
Notebooks: G4 Titanium 1ghz with SSD, PB G4 Aluminum 15/17 inch 1.67 DLSD.
Desktops: G4 MDD Dual 1.25/2MB L3 and Dual 1.42, PM G5 2.3/2.5 Quad.
The rest under those are useless junk that won't do much at all. The above are the top of their categories.. For instance a G4 PB aluminum without DDR2 will perform horribly, versus the DLSD. The Titanium G4 versus, say a weak G4 12 inch PB will perform nicely with the L3 cache.
Just my .02
Notebooks: G4 Titanium 1ghz with SSD, PB G4 Aluminum 15/17 inch 1.67 DLSD.
Desktops: G4 MDD Dual 1.25/2MB L3 and Dual 1.42, PM G5 2.3/2.5 Quad.
The rest under those are useless junk that won't do much at all. The above are the top of their categories.. For instance a G4 PB aluminum without DDR2 will perform horribly, versus the DLSD. The Titanium G4 versus, say a weak G4 12 inch PB will perform nicely with the L3 cache.
Just my .02
I’m gonna disagree with this. Absolutely not “useless junk”.
I don’t even own a DLSD PowerBook because I don’t have $500 to spend on a 15 year old laptop.
I have multiple 1.5Ghz models. They have served as my daily drivers for about two years now.
Saying a dual G4 is useable but say a 1.8 DP G5 isn’t, makes absolutely zero sense. My DP 1.8 as well as 2.0 does great, and runs circles around my MDD for most things. The higher amount of memory alone makes that true for any G5.
You also can’t say a Titanium PowerBook has merrit when it is in fact slower than every aluminum ever put on the market, save for the 867Mhz models.
I'm going to stick up for Macbookprodude a little and say that what he wrote depends upon what the intended use is. If running Mac OS9 is your thing, then the MDD/Ti suggestion makes some sense as those were the fastest machines that booted pre-OSX natively.
Now it gets complicated because there are a few later machines that will boot Mac OS9 without having been designed to do so and with varying degrees of success. Add to that the potential improvement in running Classic on G5 and the waters get muddier still. It all depends upon what your use case is.
Now it gets complicated because there are a few later machines that will boot Mac OS9 without having been designed to do so and with varying degrees of success. Add to that the potential improvement in running Classic on G5 and the waters get muddier still. It all depends upon what your use case is.
I am fairly confident that he is referring to usefulness in 2020 doing modern internet things.
Which if that is your only goal with a PPC Mac you should find a different hobby and buy an iPad IMO.
DLSD PowerBook's for example are totally incapable of running OS 9 at all, and if you somehow got it to boot, it would be utterly useless as the Radeon 9700 doesn't work at all in OS 9.
How come my 1.67ghz DDR1 PB gets almost the same GB score as the DLSD then?
Can we please drop this stupid "benchmark"?
I have one of those too; still use the 1.5 because it has 128MB vram and my 1.67 has 64MB. Makes a pretty big difference when my game of choice is usually knights of the old republic.
Seriously though that’d be great.Can we please drop this stupid "benchmark"?
I have a 1.5 GHz 12" PowerBook and used to have a DLSD. There was no noticeable performance difference between the two. Honestly these things are all so old now that slight variations between models sold in the same year are not enough to be that noticeable today IMHO. Software is by far the biggest issue. Pretty much anything that brings the 1.25 GHz to its knees will do the same to the 1.5 and the 1.67.
I also have a 1 GHz titanium PowerBook and the 1.5 GHz 12" is noticeably faster; I just don't like it as much. But that is several years newer than the Tibook so one would expect better CPU performance
The 600X can take up to 576mb, a peculiar amount because it has 64mb soldered to the motherboard and space for 2x256mb memory modules. XP installs and is usable - until you upgrade to service pack two, and add .NET, and Silverlight, at which point it slows to a crawl. What a total waste of time and bandwidth Silverlight was.
As a vintage games machine it's in a frustrating spot where the processor is in theory powerful enough to run Quake III at 40fps or so without breaking a sweat - but the GPU doesn't have OpenGL support or any kind of 3D acceleration, which is one of the things that separated ThinkPads from PowerBooks at the time. Apple's machines generally had better GPUs than the competition.
Still, it's a nostalgic reminder of the days when laptops only had a single USB port.
What I liked most about my 600E was that all the hardware had drivers for Windows 3.1, NT 3.51 and OS/2. It was a perfect
This is one of those perennial topics and I suppose it depends on whether you're willing to go for "slow computing". Back in June I bought a 2009 Mac Mini - a 2ghz Core II Duo with 8gb of memory - purely because I liked the idea of a more-or-less silent machine that could still surf the internet, for those times when I didn't feel like firing up my desktop machine. In that context the chuggy performance and awful GPU were acceptable, although it had trouble with YouTube so in retrospect a 2011 Mac Mini would probably have been a better option. The 2009 model was the first with dual-display support, which is one of those must-haves that I must have. At least until I buy an enormous super-widescreen 21:9 curved.
As mentioned my desktop PC is an LGA 1155 machine, which I built from scratch in 2011 around an i5-2500k. Judging purely by Geekbench scores it was on a par with the most basic 2012 Mac Pro when I built it. The 2500k remained competitive for an unusually long time and with a decent GPU will still run modern games at sub-60fps at 1080.
Nonetheless I upgraded it a few weeks ago with a cheap Xeon 1275 (the server version of the i7-3770), which was essentially the most powerful CPU available for that socket - the performance boost is modest, essentially bringing it in line with the first-generation cylindrical Mac Pro. At this point the machine is essentially at the limit of what LGA 1155 can do; it's a 2013 supercomputer that, seven years later, is now mediocre but still usable.
It runs *Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020* at 1080 / sub-60fps but that's an edge case, because FS2020 is unusually hard on a system, taxing the CPU, the GPU, and the memory/storage bandwidth. Beyond that any decent LGA 1155 machine with suitable upgrades is, in my opinion, still perfectly valid as a main desktop machine unless you do masses of virtualisation or run a Youtube channnel. I'm a bit out of touch but I understand for games the general idea is that AMD's processors have more cores and are in theory more powerful, but Intel's processors have faster individual cores for which games are optimised, but I'm not an expert.
Again in my opinion with the early i5 / Core II Duo / Core II Quad era you reach a point where it doesn't make sense to max out a desktop build, because you end up with something that runs at 40% load all the time just when it's idling. One paradox of moving to a higher-clocked CPU of a newer generation is that it sometimes runs cooler than its predecessors because it only has to use 5% of its capacity instead of 30% (I mention this because my Xeon runs around 5c cooler than my i5-2500k, despite using the exact same heatsink, presumably because it copes more easily with essentially the same workload).
Thanks for sharing. I am in the process of “downsizing” from 7th gen core to some random C2D (hello my dollar burger) since cMP I bought this year is serving me very well. The C2D is a stopgap “service station” (flash graphic card, update SSD firmware, etc.) If the selling works out well I could upgrade to Ryzen 3 almost for free.
Intel still has some lead in single core performance but has almost no room to grow with their current fab process. I am waiting for Zen 3 to eat away their remaining lead. Kudos to Intel for finally up their graphics game, BTW.
Intel still has some lead in single core performance but has almost no room to grow with their current fab process. I am waiting for Zen 3 to eat away their remaining lead. Kudos to Intel for finally up their graphics game, BTW.
But, I can state that compared to my DLSD 1.67, the 1ghz Titanium with L3 Cache is much faster for some reasons. The 7447A/B processor lacks L3 which is why its so so slow, but the Titanium's 7455 with 1MB L3 runs very nicely, even with a nice 512GB SSD.
Some didn't even have any ports. Both of my Butterfly701 Thinkpads have a solitary port on the rear - for the port replicator. Or, in this case, the port creator since without it you are limited to either the external floppy drive or the PCMCIA for data I/O and screwed if the screen dies.
Can you report some realworld stats to illustrate this eg web page opening times, importing to iTunes, video transcoding etc
Except for any of the Macs that had a Rage 128. There’s zero reason for Apple to use the Rage 128 after the year 2000. iMac G3s could’ve actually beuseable machines if they put a half decent GPU in them. Ironically I have a couple thinkpads (A22m and A21m) that also have Rage 128s in them, which is also their biggest bottleneck. Makes them useless for anything other than a glorified type writer as far as even era correct gaming goes.
I lol’d a little at the USB comment. I forgot there were laptops with only one port. I wouldn’t say that’s nostalgic since today we’re lucky if a laptop has more than one USB port. That’s part of the reason I like using PowerBooks, if I wanted a single port device I’d buy an iPad. Or a surface pro. Which I actually own one of those but it is not my daily driver.
This is not my experience. I like the 1 GHz titanium a lot--it's actually my favorite laptop--but opening web browsers, playing audio with mplayer, burning ISOs to CD, is all faster on the 1.5 GHz PowerBook. The Tibook is no slouch, but the difference is enough to notice.
We're gonna get you to move your desk down to the basement. If you could go ahead and do that... that'd be great. As for not getting your pay... you'll have to talk with HR about that.
Sorry all... just sticking with the Office Space theme.
We're gonna get you to move your desk down to the basement. If you could go ahead and do that... that'd be great. As for not getting your pay... you'll have to talk with HR about that.
Sorry all... just sticking with the Office Space theme.
Why don't ya go ahead and..get yourself a can of pesticide.
The reason might have been... because they could.
Wow, Linux Mint Cinnamon works very well on a C2D with motherboard integrated GPU. Sure it is using 1080 resolution for a 4K monitor but it passes YouTube test.
This is pretty much exactly my experience. I love my 1Ghz TiBook. It’s my favorite to play old games on, games running on the quake3 (idTech3) engine absolutely plays beautifully on it. I can even play kotor on it, albeit on the lowest settings.
My 1.5Ghz PBs are indeed noticeably faster.
I’d admittedly use the TiBook more often if I could connect it to wifi though. I don’t bother with getting the OG airport cards on my network. I live in an apartment complex. Allowing WPA1 would be a security risk.