Thanks to valuable pieces of advice to all.
How about the CPU upgrade. For my needs G4/400 should suffice, but if my son decides to get adventurous and install Jaguar or some other beast later, would it help at all? From what I read, given the bus and RAM bottlenck anything over 400-500 Mhz is a gimmick. Unless I misunderstood the technicals.
It completely depends on the type of applications you're using. The 800 MHz G4 which is available runs the CPU at 20 times the bus speed. So any time the CPU must wait for access to the memory it takes quite a performance hit. But, the caches on that CPU are running quite fast and the CPU has good access to them.
So for applications which stay mainly in the cache, 800 MHz will be close to twice as fast as 400 MHz. However, for applications which spend a lot of time accessing the memory because the cache missed the needed data, the 800 MHz won't be a lot faster than the slower CPUs.
A good average cache hit percentage is 85%. So figure on the average an application is sending the CPU out to the slow memory for data about 15% of the time, but the rest of the time you really are benefiting from the additional speed.
Jeff Walther
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