My New Mac

Boyko

Boyko

Mad Scientist
Ladies and gentlemen, I've finally decided which Macintosh I'm going to get. Because I'm a student, I've decided to look at the student-discounted PCs, and saw the "Entry" G4 Powermac. It's only got a 733mhz processor but for $250 less than the 800 mhz processor I figure that it would be a better buy. 733mhz *should* last me almost as long as an 800mhz processor would have.

Other than that, the systems are identical to the "Fast" computer on the Apple home page - I'm just going to get the base configuration, figuring that I can upgrade later (especially the Ram.) I have a DVD Rom drive that I, for some reason, could never get to work in my PC (I think it has to do with the size of the cashe on the motherboard - I forget, it's been a long time since I looked at it.) but I could use that in my Mac - I've checked www.xlr8yourmac.com and it should be 100% compatable. I don't really need dvd-r burning, just CD-RW burning. On top of that, although the LCD screens are nice, CRT screens are cheaper and I already have one - I can always upgrade later when I come into money. So I'll just use the 15 inch CRT that I use with my PC.

Without further ado, my Mac will have:

733 mhz G4 Powermac Silver Tower, 256MB Ram, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, MacOSX.

And my current PC has: 300mhz AMDk6-1, 128MB Ram, CD-R, Win98SE

Brian.
 
Best part is, of course, that the final cost of the system is weighing in at $1250 - lower cost than the low-end iMac and more Ram and processor power to boot.

Brian.
 
PC users are converting to Mac, Mac users are converting to PC...
How will this end?

Yaya, if this continues, we'll have 95 % Mac users and 5 % PC users in the future :rolleyes:
 
Boyko, a suggestion, with any spare cash you find, buy RAM before prices go up any more. It's good to have at LEAST 512 for running osx. My friend has a DP450 with a gig of ram and it's pretty smooth, makes me want a gig :D Maybe Christmas...
 
Hello!

I strongly agree with the RAM thing, I have 384Mb of RAM in my 733Mhz Quicksilver and it fills out so fast (I found this out thanks to MUG by simX) For example, as I am writing this I have the following apps open:

Finder 10.13
Mail 1.1
Internet Explorer 5.1
Internet Connect 1.1
Iconographer 2.2
Interface Builder 2.2
Project Builder 1.11
MUG 2.01b4
Photoshop 7.0b43
GoLive 5.0

And I only have just over 4Mb of memory available. For me, I do alot of web and application programming and it is frustrating to have to quit applications so others will not crash. Get as much RAM as you can afford since you will never have too much.

Have a great day!

Albert
 
Originally posted by ksv
PC users are converting to Mac, Mac users are converting to PC...
How will this end?

Yaya, if this continues, we'll have 95 % Mac users and 5 % PC users in the future :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I don't think we want that cause according to that calculation you and me would be using WinXP by the end of the year...

And Boyko, I have a question for you.
How did you fit both the CD-RW and the DVD-Rom in your Quicksilver?(I have both, but have to swap)

Congrats with those specs, now, put them in your signature.
And I read somewhere that the PowerMac 733Mhz is faster than a 800Mhz iMac
 
Originally posted by voice-


I don't think we want that cause according to that calculation you and me would be using WinXP by the end of the year...

And Boyko, I have a question for you.
How did you fit both the CD-RW and the DVD-Rom in your Quicksilver?(I have both, but have to swap)

Congrats with those specs, now, put them in your signature.
And I read somewhere that the PowerMac 733Mhz is faster than a 800Mhz iMac
Click to expand...

:(

I didn't. I thought I could but when I went to check it out in the store (the purchase isn't through yet) the clerk pointed out to me that that 2nd bay is only for a zip or floppy drive. So my parents offered to spring the extra $100 bucks for a CD-RW/DVD-Rom combo drive.

This really is an engineering decision I don't understand - being able to use my old DVD drive was one of the reasons I went with the tower instead of the Imac... and would it have killed Apple to make it a 5&1/4 bay with 3&1/2 braces instead of just a 3&1/2 bay? And if it's a 3&1/2 bay only, why make the 2nd opening slot look just as big as the first from the outside?

Brian.
 
The iMac, much like the Cube or the early TiBooks, runs the G4 on a much slower Fronsidebus. I am not 100% sure, but I think the new iMac runs the G4 at just 100 Mhz FSB (much like the older Sawtooth Powermacs). The Quicksilver PowerMac (and the top-of-the-line TiBook and IIRC even the Shark Powermac) now runs on 133 FSB (the cause for the "strange" Megahertz counts...867 etc)...

FSB is very important for the performance, it dictaces for example at which speed the processor can talk to the RAM. A processor is "configured" by the FSB of the system and the multiplicator. If you ever had to install a PC CPU, you might have already done this. This is also how you overclock CPUs.

The FSB multiplied with the Multiplicator gives you the final speed of the processor, that's why the 133 FSB machines have sometimes strange MHZ counts.

FSB is very important, since the bottleneck of the current G4 architecture is the RAM (this is why the new G4 with it's larger second level cache is such important). 1 Ghz don't help you very much if you are not able to feed the processor fast enough with data, which often is stored in the RAM. This data is fetched at a speed equal to the FSB to the processor, where it is computed directly or again saved in a much faster "RAM", the processor cache. The processor can talk to this special kind of RAM much faster, in case of the first level cache, at FULL PROCESSOR SPEED!

This is why an 800 Mhz Quicksilver and an 800 Mhz iMac are not completely equal!

And hopefully, with the G5, the FSB is finally lifted to 266 Mhz...
 
ulrik: What about current pc:s? Do they run on 100, 133 or more?

And the strange mhz-count... what about quicksilver 800? "Normal" count.

Just some questions that popped up.

And all these basic informations about processors... are there any place where theres a little summary or something?

Thanks.
 
I am not up to date, but IIRC the current AMDs run at 266 MHZ FSB,...the Pentium 4 runs at up to 400 Mhz FSB, with Rambus such a system is freaking fast, but we all know what happened to Intel's Rambus-plans :)
 
Current PC's are anywhere from 100 to 400. If we had 400 fsb's, that would help performance a bit...
Get cracking on HyperTransport apple!
 
Originally posted by Boyko


This really is an engineering decision I don't understand - being able to use my old DVD drive was one of the reasons I went with the tower instead of the Imac... and would it have killed Apple to make it a 5&1/4 bay with 3&1/2 braces instead of just a 3&1/2 bay? And if it's a 3&1/2 bay only, why make the 2nd opening slot look just as big as the first from the outside?

Brian.
Click to expand...

I asked the guy running xlr8yourmac.com that very same thing, and he said you couldn't run that way since the beige G3 tower.
It's not the OS, it works fine with 2 CD-roms(Tried a USB CD-RW) and it's not the tower, cause it has all plugs needed.
Apple was stupid on this one.
 
Well, 800 is a multiplicator of 6. 6x133 = 798 Mhz, the 867 has a multiplicator of 6,5.

A higher multiplicator does NOT relate into faster speeds, as you see, 6x133 results in a slower CPU than 7x100...it basically depends on the FSB.

That's why it is so easy to overclock PCs. With current boards, you can set the FSB Megahertz-wise...a real cool feature. Back when I used PCs, I only had the choice between three FSBs, 66, 100 and 133....


Well, I don't know where to get such information bundled, but I find it always interesting to read the developer informations on the AMD, Intel and Motorola page. I also have a VERY interesting comparisson of the G4+ (digital audio version...the one on the shark motherboard) and the P4...but you should understand Assembler to understand the article, since he explains why different assembler commands take longer on certain processors...but after it, you will understand my "FXCH is no longer free" joke...basically, a processor can have two different (there are more, but I will concentrate on these) kinds of storing data it needs for further calculation. It stores them in registers, and one of them is the so-called Stack. You can push data pieces onto the stack and later, once you need them, take them back from the stack. This happens very fast, a few thousand times faster than when you save them in slow RAM. Now, the problem is, the stack has one drawback: you can only get the last data you pushed on it, this is called a FIFO-stack, first in first out. Such a stack is found on P3 and P4. So let's say you push three words ( a word is the maximum number of data a CPU can handle per operation...32 bit in case of G4 or P4) on the stack, but now you need the second word, you would have to remove one word you don't need in order to reach the second word you need. So some CPU designers invented the "flat registry" which the G4 uses. In this, you can access any data, regardless of when you pushed it into the registry. Intel knew that with the P3, they had to change the stack to keep up with the trend, but instead of following the "modern" flat registry, they managed to make the FXCH command free. This command exchanges two pieces of data in the stack. The P3 does this on 0 processor cycles, so basically, you have a flat registry since you can access ANY data. If it is burried deep within the stack, just FXCH the top piece with the needed piece, pop it out of the stack, and FXCH again. Now, on the P4, FXCH again needs one processor cycle, a huge drawback when it comes to stack access, making it harder for compiler-builders to create the stack access in a fast way...
 
I took Assembly Language for a semester. I think that was the semester I decided to switch majors from CompSci to history.

Eeek. Yeah, that is a curious decision - it would also explain - or at least partially explain - why my sister's celeron 1.2ghz (presumably based on the P4?) is slow.

Brian.
 
Originally posted by ksuther
Boyko, a suggestion, with any spare cash you find, buy RAM before prices go up any more. It's good to have at LEAST 512 for running osx. My friend has a DP450 with a gig of ram and it's pretty smooth, makes me want a gig :D Maybe Christmas...
Click to expand...


I think they're high enough already! a 512 MB PC 100 RAM
has gone up 2x's price since december. I'm waiting for it to
go down ....
 
Hey

Do what I did - sign up for the $99 per year Student Developer program through Apple. After you get your welcome kit go and sign on and purchase the new computer with your Student Develoepr Discount, thats right boys and Girls, for that $99 I got my Titanium for $2399 instead of $2999. The regular student discount was around $2819...so for $99 you save ALOT MORE

Also you can buy WebObjects for $99 and Mac OS X Server for $99, did both and put them on my cube 450.

And another plus is once a month you get the developer updates....



jim
 
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