OS X.2 speed on B&W, etc.?

Ripcord

Ripcord

Senior Lurker
I'm thinking about picking up another Mac for my desk at work.

For work purposes, I wouldn't really need it to do much other than browse the web, act as a telnet & ftp head, run Word, and just generally look cool.

And the last one is what I'm most interested in. I work for a tech company, and we're a 100% PC shop. We have a lot of Linux/Unix die-hards, Windows geeks, etc., and I get the feeling that most everyone in the building hasn't ever seen a post-Performa Mac, let alone OS X.

I get the feeling I'll be showing off and defending the Mac as much as using it. I don't have major needs for the box, and don't want to spend a lot of money on the Mac, but I don't want people saying "man, that IS an Apple! It's so slow and cruddy!" when I show off X.

How well would something like a B&W G3 400 run X?

My only real personal experiences have been with my current DigAud G3/533 running X.2 & QE, which I'm VERY happy with the speed on, and my old 7200/180 running X.1 (yes, I got it to work), which is absolutely unbearable.

What would be the slowest machine you'd consider any kind of X "show-off" computer?

Rip
 
I use two Mac :

a Dual G4 at work and a B&W 350 at home.

The B&W350 is fine for everything home related (Browser, Office, Music, Movies, DVD player, Mail...). But with 768 M Ram. That's the key. Went from 128 to 256 then to 768/Jaguar and I thought I had a new machine (so i decided to wait '2003 with X boot only hardware to buy a new Mac for home).

For Java dev or Project Builder, it is also enough.

Only a few games need to be set to the minimal options (MaxPayne is the last one i bought and i had to set about half of the settings to the lowest level)
 
I guess one thing that seemed to make a major difference to me were general UI speeds. For example, with my DigAud, window moving updates are exceptionally fast (I assume due to QE), dragging cursor over a "Zooming" Dock usually updates faster than the eye can see, etc. Genie minimizes, etc., do not "jump". Launch speeds are pretty good.

I guess the question is, while I'm pretty sure that a 400mhz B&W would be fast enough to get my work done, would it be "enough" to show off the features of X and generally impress people (and not irritat and turn them off with a jerky, laggy UI)?

I know one thing that I'm really going to miss is QE, expecially since I like to set semi-transparent terminal windows, etc. Has anyone had any luck running those PCI "enabler" programs to get qualifying PCI-based Radeons, etc. to run QE? I've never read a post where anyone commented on how well these progs _worked_.

Rip
 
"PCI "enabler" programs to get qualifying PCI-based Radeons, etc. to run QE? "

shouldnt OSX auto recoginize hardware acceleration?
I have a powerbook G3 500mhz, (128MB ram- 384MB tommorow)
and it runs fine, just chokes whith more than one app (but I think thats more due to lack of ram). The B&W 400mhz should perform very well as long as it has a 100Mhz fsb and has 256Mb ram...
 
My B&W runs great for all I want to do with it. Heck, I was playing Warcraft III last night, on the 3 year old stock Rage 128. It's a 350 O/C'd to 400 with 512 MB of RAM. Although it's nothing that I'd want to show off to a bunch of my die hard speed junkie PC friends.

If you're looking for a cheap computer I'd recommend trying to find anything with a g4. Even if it's a 350 or 400 it will be a ton faster than the G3 of the same speed, with little increased cost.
 
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