1GHz G3 and G4 comparisons

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Hokusai's picture
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1GHz G3 and G4 comparisons

Does anyone know if there have been any comparison tests done between Sonnet's 1GHz G4 and Powerlogix's 1GHz G3 zif upgrade? Just curious...

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xlr8yourmac.com

xlr8yourmac always has that sort of thing. Everything you want should be in the CPU upgrade section.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

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Hmm...

Yea, I've looked at Xlr8YourMac's website. But, I was hoping someone had actually done a side-by-side comparison between these two upgrades. I was wondering how bad the performance hit on the G4 upgrade, from its lowered system bus speed, would be.

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G3 ZIF

Powerlogix's site lists "user adjustable bus ratio" Not sure if it means you can go above 100Mhz with their software... But, I can't imagine you could REALLY tell the difference between the two bus speeds without a stopwatch... We're talking tenths of seconds here, for processes that you do on a daily basis. Sure, they add up. But come on, the only real advantave of the G4 is Altivec - IF you use programs that require it on a daily basis. Rip lots of CD's every day? Get a G4. Use Photoshop everyday all day long? then the G4 (over time will be worth it). Time = Money. But if your looking at bang for the buck - I would say the G3 is just fine... I jump between My DP 1.0 at home and a DP 500 at work, and the only difference I see is in CD rip times, and rendering big 3D CAD files - and we're talking seconds, perhaps 15 seconds for a LARGE CAD file...

I get caught up in the numbers game, but user experience isn't really THAT different between my 2 machines...

Peace.

If your talking Games, well the Video card upgrades You can do will make a World of difference...

BTW: I see you are perhaps speaking about installing these ZIF's in a 100MHz bus machine - where the G4 can run at higher bus speeds? I still don't think there will be much difference... Cheers.

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http://www.barefeats.com/Gup.

http://www.barefeats.com/Gup.htm shows a 400 MHz shootout and that shows that 1.there is not much difference in performance in G3 and G4 outside altivec and that the slow bus boxes fare quite well compared to faster ones. This was with 400 MHz CPUs on 50-66-100 MHz busses but I expect similar findings with 1000 MHz and 100-167 MHz busses.
If I had a B&W G3 I would settle for a G3 with no drivers rather than a G4.
Spending 230-250 dollar for a 800-900 MHz G3 seem to be a good idea but 480 Dollars for a 1 GHz G4 then its way to close to the price of a eMac that will be vastly superior to any B&W.

The B&W would be better for gaming if there was cheap decent 3D cards for it. The PC ATI 7000 is 30 dollars or so

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Upgrades

I agree; if you approach $500 for any upgrade of an older system, your money would be better spent on a new system, be it an eMac or older upgradeable tower. Emacs are a good bargain, but slightly used towers offer a great deal of options with PCI cards, not to mention the AGP video...

Cheers.

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