G4 400, Any good?

Paul C

Paul C

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I'm selling my ibook G3 800 cos it keeps breaking on me, I'm looking at a Powermac G4 400, I've only ever had this ibook and imac G3 400 and I know that the Powermac's are a lot faster than the 'i' range, I will be mainly using it for surfing the net, word/excel and a little video editting with imovie will the G4 400 be good enough if I load it with lots of RAM?

The reason why I like the look of a Powermac rather than an emac is that the Powermac are easier to upgrade
 
I had a G4 400 and it was kinda slow with OS X 10.2.8 even though i had close to 1 Ghz of RAM. I upgraded it to a 1Ghz G4 with a nVidia Geforce2 (i think) and it was much more responsive. I think a G4 400 would be faster than a G3 400 but not your G3 800 .... but that's only my guess.
 
I'd love a G4 1ghz but I've only got about £500 (about $900) so I can't afford a blistering Powermac and I really wanna get rid of this ibook before it goes wrong..................AGAIN!!!

I could get a good PC with this amount of money but wanna stay true to Apple cos I far prefer OS X to Windows.
 
at school we still have a lab of powermac 466 G4's i believe, and they run ok, for the stuff you will be doing video editting will be slow but you shouldnt have to much trouble with the rest, get as much ram as possible and try and keep your system clean and uncluttered, like Fuzz said maybe in a few months you can upgrade it with a new processor from sonnet or somewhere
 
Aren't those processor upgrades expensive, I only do a little bit of vid editing but only home video no really technical stuff, whats the difference between the AGP and PCI versions?
 
I've just mailed him now but hopefully it's the AGP model cos he said it's nt that old and it's got the newish k'board/mouse *fingers crossed*
 
Processor upgrades for G4s are much cheaper than they used to be. I got an 800MHz upgrade from GigaDesigns for about $250. I think they only do higher spec ones now but I noticed an equivalent on Other World Computing for about the same price.

The other useful thing is upgrading the video card. Make sure you get an AGP model (Sawtooth) but it will probably come with the ATI Rage which isn't compatible with Quartz Extreme. I picked up a 32mb Mac Radeon on ebay for £30, there are usually quite a few around and they're probably cheaper by now. RAM isn't too expensive either.

My original system spec was 350MHz/ATI 16mb/128mb RAM/9gb and you can see in my signature what I'm up to now. I did it over the course of a few years but it wasn't too expensive and my Mac is still powerful enough for most stuff e.g. Cubase SX, InDesign, Photoshop and even some new games like SimCity 4. I don't think it will run Doom 3 though :)
 
I have it, the AGP model for almost 4 years now, and it still gets the work done. I plan to get a G5, but I will keep this as a back-up machine, because i've seen G5s with problems. I've put in memory and I have 3 hard drives, and added a superdrive. What type of work will you be doing?
 
I will just be surfing the net, word/excel, itunes and doing a little bit of stuff in imovie from my Sony Digicamcorder.
 
yea, it's good for that, although i use FCP instead of iMovie. My only problem is rendering time for some of my larger projects. It's no big deal, i just do something else. The system is responsive, but you will need lots of ram. You see how much i have, i use a lot of apps the eat RAm, like PS, Ill, Flash, AE... so the more the better.

I have iTunes open all the time, I work to music basically all the time.

I used the sony TR.. something, no problems with firewire, I man that always worked great. I use to hook my computer up to my tv via the Sony DV cam, and play back my projects full screen. I also did this in the editing process.

If you can get a dual processor 500, I would go with that.
 
I plan of stuffing as much memory in it as possible :D

I have a Sony TRV19 which is use via firewire and really like.

How can you tell the difference between the AGP and the PCI just incase the guy doesn't know which one it is?
 
Look on the back, that's the quickest way.
The AGP - sound in/out ports are vertical

PCI ports are horizontal
 
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