Where'd all the Power Mac G4s go?

[philz4life]

I work for a large non-profit and just a month or so ago we filled a 5'x5'x4' container with loads of old electronics, including at least 8 PowerMac G4s (mirror door, sawtooth & digital audio) and a few Apple Studio CRT displays, that was sent to recycling. My inner Apple hoarder was sobbing but the thought of my wife giving me hell was enough to not drag anything else home. I DID grab a perfect Pro Mouse and a few PowerMac G3/G4 cords, the cool translucent Apple branded ones. Anyway, might be worth it to check with a few bigger local companies that use Macs as they will often have little piles of older equipment too.

Wow, I can't resist things like that, so I would have taken everything. I really hope I can find places like that around where I live.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

I was thinking that, too, a long time. But for "everyday" tasks, Mac OS X never exceeds 512MB on G4. I was converting from iMovie to h.264 and I thought it would profit from much RAM, but only around 512MB were used..

If you had 2GB, it'd probably use the 2GB [if it was a big file.] OS X likes RAM, it likes room to spread out, if you have more, it'll use more to run more efficiently.

A 466MHz G4 with 512MB... guess it depends which OS, and what you're doing. That was what I had. 256 > 512 (or was it 640MB?) made a *huge* difference, then on Leopard, going to 1.25GB was a nice boost again. After that, the GPU upgrade was the next huge boost.

 

[Cox Orange]

If you had 2GB, it'd probably use the 2GB [if it was a big file.] OS X likes RAM, it likes room to spread out, if you have more, it'll use more to run more efficiently.

A 466MHz G4 with 512MB... guess it depends which OS, and what you're doing. That was what I had. 256 > 512 (or was it 640MB?) made a *huge* difference, then on Leopard, going to 1.25GB was a nice boost again. After that, the GPU upgrade was the next huge boost.

The DV file was 18GB big. But while converting, it seems to only route a small piece to the RAM, the moment it is converting that part/piece of the whole 18GB. If you know what I am trying to express (language barrier / my bad English).

Of Course there is a difference between 256MB and 512MB, but I was talking about 1,5GB versus 2GB in the PowerMacs.

Edit: maybe iMovie does barely use the 2GB, because with a system Bus of 100MHz and SATA-PCI attached SATA drives that at best can deliver 37MB/s (yes benchmarks tell you it is 100MB/s, but I did several real life tests, stopping the time and calculating), so it does not have an advantage of buffering 1,5GB of DV files into the RAM, when it only can handle a few MB in time and it has to convert them "on the fly".
Again, I am talking about the difference of 1,5 to 2GB of RAM. Which is used as an argument for the AGP and Gigabit ethernet G4s over the DA/Quicksilvers.