On Sep 30, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Simon Royal wrote:
> Simon > > I wouldn't say there was a massive improvement. It certainly is > nippier and > better at handling lots of things at once. > > But really the jump from a 400 to a 550 isn't that great even it it > was on > the same processor spectrum. But a G3 400 to a G4 550 should be > quite a big > jump in speed. It depends. The G4 and the G3 are differentiated mainly by the presence of the Altivec vector co-processor in the G4. For applications that make specific use of the Altivec (things like ripping iTunes and rendering movies in iMovie, the speed differences will be quite large. For straight up CPU-bound stuff, there will be almost no difference. OS X shows an improvement because it does use the Altivec in some things. Pretty much all the speed difference you saw, if it was day-to-day stuff, is the 150 MhZ difference between a 400 and 550 processor. A 37% increase in clock speed is going to be quite noticeable. If you're going from a 500Mhz G3 to the 550, it's not nearly as noticeable. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Low End Mac's G-Books list, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
