G4 Vs G3

Hey I currently have a G3 500mhz Imac But I want to get a used tower would a G4 at 400mhz be faster than my G3 at 500mhz? The ram in both are equal and same with harddrvie space.

Hello, I have a G3 500 iMac and a 450 G4 sawtooth tower (the first G4 tower made). The tower 'feels' quicker when zipping around the OS (I'm using 10.4, latest update) and surfing is faster. The graphics card in the tower is twice as good as the one in the iMac though!

Both machines had 1GB of RAM in.

If you were spending money getting the tower to replace the iMac, and not upgrade the tower, then your money may be better off going into RAM for the iMac? But I don't know what you are doing with it.

I'm sure some of the more experienced users here will be able to explain what I have just tried to say far better than I did!

Hey thanks for the reply, Do you really think adding ram to the Imac is worth the money because I already have 512 and the max is 1024 and I belive the ram is about 100 ish dollars canadian where I can pick up a sawtooth at about 512 ram and 450 mhz for about 200. but anyways how do the sawtooths perform when encoding movies IE burning avi to DVD becasue my imac take about an average of 16 hours.

A friend of mine used to have a Tangerine G3 imac @ 333mhz with 512mb ram in it.. It ran Tiger fairly well.. Anything more than Safari, MSN, and iTunes and it'd start to chug a bit..

I own a 400mhz G4 PowerMac tower, also with 512mb and if I compared them side-by-side, the PowerMac blew it out of the water. I can do quite the bit of multitasking, given what's in it.