Picked up two free Quicksilvers!

[applefan1997]

Just picked them up free from craigslist!

One is a Dual 800, other is the single 800. Both have AP! No HD's tho. The dual has one broken USB port (plastic part).

With the dual processors, and 2MB cache, would these be faster than the 1.25GHz iMac I have?

 

[666sheep]

With the dual processors, and 2MB cache, would these be faster than the 1.25GHz iMac I have?

Nope. It'll be little slower than 1.25 in general, except multithreaded apps/tasks. QS has slower bus and and uses SDRAM so L3 advantage will be reduced.

 

[applefan1997]

I see. I'm hoping it might be better in video/iMovie type things, because I had a 667 TiBook with an 1MB L3 and it ran YouTube better than the iMac. Go figure.

 

[im_to_hyper]

I'm pretty sure if you are using Tiger with the latest version of Safari that Youtube would definitely run better having two processors.

iMovie rendering would be a lot better, as should quite a few tasks. The single core G4 isn't really up to snuff, but I'd say the dual 800MHz has a lot of use.

I fiddled around with a couple of G4 iMacs last spring and the dual G4s, even an 800MHz scored better in Geekbench and handled Office 2008 a lot better, too.

 

[LimeiBook86]

Nice!

I have a 733 QuickSilver at my parent's house. With it's built-in Zip drive it's a great way to transfer files between old Macs that have a SCSI Zip drive. I bought it for $15 and it replaced my Dad's 450Mhz AGP G4. I added a USB 2.0 card and iChat on OS X 10.4. It works quick well, even video chat with the Xbox 360 camera works decently.

 

[barkmonster]

Just picked them up free from craigslist!

One is a Dual 800, other is the single 800. Both have AP! No HD's tho. The dual has one broken USB port (plastic part).

With the dual processors, and 2MB cache, would these be faster than the 1.25GHz iMac I have?

I use my mac for audio work, which is heavily threaded and takes full advantage of both CPUs.

With a single 800Mhz G4 with no L3 cache it originally came with and 1Gb RAM, I could record 12 mono tracks with 5 common effect plug-ins on each track before it ran out of CPU and the interface slowed down to the point where it was next to unusable.

With a dual 800Mhz board added that has 2Mb L3 cache per CPU and upping the RAM to 1.5Ghz, it went to 29 tracks with the same set of plug-ins and absolutely no lag at all.

As long as the software is threaded, all things being equal, I'm sure it has a fighting chance against a single 1.25Ghz system because by design, the G4 CPU still only sees the RAM as SDRAM even if the motherboard has DDR RAM so a lot of the potential bandwidth is wasted.

I've added a lot to my Mac to keep it ticking over, all cheaply with parts off eBay.

I bought it for £380 off eBay about 7 years ago then upgraded it with various PCI cards to keep it as current as possible:-

1) USB 2.0 PCI card with 4 external ports and 1 internal port with a bluetooth USB stick on the internal port (useful with EVERY non-apple mobile phone from the past decade, Apple LOVE Wi-Fi a little too much considering most of us connect to the internet using our computers AND smartphones!)

2) 2 x 512Mb DIMMs to take it to 1.5Gb

3) GeForce 6200 AGP graphics card for Quartz accelerated video on 2 LCDs

4) Radeon 7000 PCI card for TV out

5) Faster 250Gb 7200rpm Maxtor drive partitioned 70Gb System, 180Gb Storage on the first ATA bus channel 0

6) Original drive added as a backup on channel 1 of the same bus

7) Superdrive on the second ATA bus channel 0

8) 120Gb 7200rpm Western Digital drive on the second ATA bus channel 1 mounted below the DVD drive.

I originally had Mac OS X 10.4 installed but used boot 132 to install Leopard on it so it's as up to date as any PowerPC based mac is ever going to get as far as the OS is concerned.

I'm considering adding a SATA card to the remaining PCI slot then to plan ahead I can at least start buying SATA based internal drives so when I'm in a position to buy a newer model, be it a used mac pro or a mac mini, I can either use the drives in external firewire cases or as a start up drive (60Gb Sandforce based SSDs are under £100 in the UK at present).

 

[dmr727]

Nice score - especially the dualie!

 

[Hrududu]

I see. I'm hoping it might be better in video/iMovie type things, because I had a 667 TiBook with an 1MB L3 and it ran YouTube better than the iMac. Go figure.

I had the same results with my TiBooks and YouTube as you. For some reason that L3 cache makes a world of difference.

 

[applefan1997]

Thanks for all the replies. I did fix up the dualie with a 100GB HD, and used it for a bit with Leopard hooked up to the TV. Eventually I decided to sell it on craigslist with a Sony CRT I picked up for free, and upped the ram to 1.5GB with some from the single. It was to be used to run CS3, which was installed on it.

I only have the single now, and I don't have an HD to use in it anymore, so I'll probably sell that one too.