Keep Dual 533 G4 or Single 933 G4?

Hello everyone! First post here.

I've been a proud owner of a dual 533 G4 7XX Ram Tower since 99. This machine has held up great and helped me as a student and beyond into my professional career.

I recently had a G4 933 512 Ram given to me for free. I was wondering from a pure power standpoint which machine is more powerful. I use a lot of Photoshop and illustrator.

Also is the upgraded ram from my 533 compatible with the 933?

I work on a dual 2ghz G5 at work so needless to say my home PC is slacking these days. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks in advance!

Is that 933 one of the older Quicksilver towers with the small oval doors on the CD Drives? That machine is very similar to the Digital Audio 533 that you have and uses the same PC133 RAM.

Adobe applications like you are using do take advantage of the Dual CPU's but I am wondering if that much faster G4 would be faster still. Both have the same AGP 4x slot for the video card. They are pretty close except for that 933 G4 CPU. Sorry for not being more sure, but I would think the 933 would be the overall faster system with most applications. It's Photoshop and Illustrator I am not sure about.

It's the newer of the G4 Quicksilvers the 2002 version.

I believe im going to give the 933 a whirl. Startup is incredible quicker than the 533. Prob put the 533 up for sale soon.

maxipad96 said:

It's the newer of the G4 Quicksilvers the 2002 version.

I believe im going to give the 933 a whirl. Startup is incredible quicker than the 533. Prob put the 533 up for sale soon.

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Yeah, knew it was the 2002 version which had the higher clocked CPU's and better video card. Good machine for it's time.

yea that 933 processor totally rocks. i went from a 733 to a 933 and there was a big differance. what os u running cause i think 10.3.9 actually controlls the dual processor setup and kicks that second one on when ya need it. anyways go max out that ram and w the 933 it should fly.

My guess is that the 933 will be much better. The majority of applications can't yet take advantage of multiple CPUs and so the increase in raw clock rate will make the machine feel a lot faster.

This is my problem with quad cores, oct cores and so on. It is great to have more cores, but I am single user on one machine, not a server. True, Photoshop and iTunes and maybe a few others can make use of more than one CPU, but by and large, more CPUs doesn't make most things run faster. We simply need faster CPUs, not more slower ones.

When I look at what is on the market today, I am distressed to see that we still seem stuck at 3.0 GHz as a top CPU rate, right where we have been for over three years! I want faster!

OK, I'll stop ranting now!

While OSX takes very good advantage of dual processors, a single 933MHz G4 will be much faster than a dual 533MHz G4. A dual 533MHz G4 would be more comparable to a single 733MHz G4.

Thanks everyone! I have for sure decided to go with the 933. Feels a lot faster than the dual 533. I went ahead and put my 512 Ram into the 933 and it works! Realized that it is pc100 compared to pc133, but from what I understand the ram will work. A PC133 slot with a 100 chip works and seems to be doing the trick.

Up to 1GB of ram in the faster machine was a great FREE upgrade. Now time to craigslist my old one.