Interested in purchasing powerbook... have some questions

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mafatumatt

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I have a very powerful PC that I made, so I am not at all interested in purchasing a Mac PC.... i'm a student working with film programs, and was wondering if when the new generation of powerbooks wit the g5 processors come out will be able to handle the functions needed with film programs... im sure they can handle photoshop and all, but I wanted to make sure they could handle all the applications that a mac desktop would....

i'm in no rush to buy one which is why i am waiting however long i need to (even if it is 1 year or more)

thanks,
matt
 

rman


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The powerbook can handle film editing now. I have a Ti powerbook, which I use FInal Cut Pro 3 to edit.

If you look at the Apple site, you will find that the movie industry has been using Final Cut Pro and both the PowerMac and the Powerbook for years.
 
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spencerb

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Don't judge performance by clock speed. PCs, particularly Intel, have high rated clock speeds, but that doesn't mean comparible performance. That's why AMD started renaming its chips (the 1.8 Ghz is called the 2200+). The 2200+ chip has performance on par with an Intel 2.2Ghz.

Does anyone know of performance ratings to compare the Mac G-chips and clock speeds to PC chips?
 
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PowerbookG417

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i have the latest powebook Rev A the 1 ghrtz AL book, and when i originally bought it could have sworn that it was a 128bit processor but im not able to find that info anymore after Rev B came out but i find it way faster than my AMD 2800. It loads Photoshop CS in 1/3 of the time that the AMD peecee can handle

The macs dont need to boast such a High processor speed because it makes up for it in the OS with less stress to none on the processor
 
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StarManta

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Eh... G4 = 32bit. G5 = 64bit. More likely, you saw 128MB video card, or something like that.

"The macs dont need to boast such a High processor speed because it makes up for it in the OS with less stress to none on the processor"

Actually, while the OS certainly helps, the processors themselves DO deliver more bang for the Hertz. If you run Linux on a 1GHz Intel, and Linux on a 1GHz G4, the G4 will still run faster. (At least, I'm 90% sure it will... if anyone's actually done this I'd like to hear about it.)
 
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From what I can tell, and there is no real testing or scientfic analysis to support this....only my experience and opinion...if you take the Mhz number from a mac Gx chip and double it, you should come close to what the
Intel equivalent would be.

for example:
a G3 400 is just about the same as a 700 to 800 Mhz Intel
a G4 500 would be about the same as a 1Ghz Intel
a G5 1.25 Ghz would be around a 2.5 Ghz Intel

you get the idea

This wil also correspond with the release dates of each processor. G3 400 was current around the same time
that Pentiums were just shy of reaching the 1 Ghz goal...around 1999 to early 2000.
 
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TylerMoney

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that sounds about riggt. I have an 18-- amd chip...and my 1ghz g4 runs faster...or so it seems thus far.
 
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brody

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i have a 2ghz p4 desktop, and my 1.25ghz powerbook will smoke it at anything. they both have a gig of RAM. actually, often times my p4 windows machine will lock up or crash while using flash (exporting movies and bitmap tracing), and my mac always pulls through them fairly quickly.
 

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