> On Saturday, May 25, 2002, at 09:19 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> How can you tell a Rev. A from a Rev. B in the Titanium powerbooks? > > Visually, they're about the same. The PowerBook G4 Titanium (which > everyone refers to as "Rev A") has vent slots in the middle of the rear > panel, between all the ports. The PowerBook G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) has > these slots, then has the same slots on the flap that covers the ports. > Besides that.... not much. > > On the technical side, there's a world of difference.
I guess we disagree... The internals were definitely changed, but resulted in not that big of a difference. As part of a purchase decision a few months ago for a media company in chicago I found the differences between rev.A and B models which were essentially broken down as: A) Physical Characteristics The "fit and finish" of the tibook was enhanced quite a bit for the Rev. B. Most of the major problems with batteries, drive alignment, etc were fixed. The chassis was also significantly stiffened to help prevent the massive flexing that could occur with the first models, although you can still push on the back of the screen and see the screen warp. B) Performance upgrades i) Processor upgrade- negligible, due to the poor stop-gap PPC chip used which has the following issues: its low MHz bump, its memory bandwidth problems and its lack of cache. Basically, the older 500mhz model would outperform the newer 550 in 90% of common tasks, although altivec was improved somewhat. The 667 was also slower than the 500 in many, many tests. The one exception would be if you were doing a heavy looped calculation that fit within the processor's small onboard cache, which could see good performance. Ii) I/O Subsystem- 667 model was moved to 133MHz bus, but this was pretty much smoke and mirrors as it results in only minor real world gains, the reasons being that its standard drives are 4200rpm, the processors' memory bandwidth problems and the firewire chip performance. It does help with AGP, but again the processor choice affects its usage. Firewire performance was greatly improved from the horrific performance of the first models, but it still is a hair behind ibook performance and not up to par with desktops. The video system received the biggest overhaul, receiving AGP graphics and a radeon mobile. Video is much, much faster than rev.A. Still lagging best of breed PC notebooks though. Airport while trumpeted by apple as being greatly improved (heh, their PR guy said "this upgrade is all about performance") showed to have a neglible improvement over the older models. Gigabit ethernet is standard, throughput is enhanced, and its autosensing works very well. -- Michael Bryan Bell http://homepage.mac.com/michael_bell/ -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
