[horrorbiz]

Does the 133mhz system bus speed in a "digital audio" G4 make that much of a difference in comparison to 100mhz "sawtooth"?

Also, besides ebay, the market place here, mac of all trades and small dog does anyone know any good places to buy used Macintosh's? I am looking for a G4 digital audio tower (mostly the 466, as money is an issue at the moment) They are pretty hard to come by, I only saw one on ebay. It makes me think they must be pretty sweet if no one is selling them and sawtooth's and yikes are everywhere.

Thank you.

[Axo1ot1]

powermax.com

[terrancew_hod]

I think you'll see just a small increase in speed; as this is just an incremental update. I think the main difference would be in the audio capabilities. And if that is true, for the price you'll probably pay for the board, you'll be better off getting a cheaper motherboard (sawtooth or gigabit ethernet) and adding a 3rd party soundcard.

You can look at the right-hand sidebar on LowEndMac.com and click on the powermac link; it has descriptions of the various types of power macs...also xlr8yourmac.com may help as well...

Terrance

[D'Espice]

It depends on what you're doing with your Mac. In most cases the difference between 100 MHz and 133 MHz FSB isn't noticeable at all. However there are some applications who may run up to 30% faster thanks to 33% higher memory bandwith - namely video editing software like FinalCut Pro/Express, audio editing software and programs like Photoshop. However it also depends on what exactly you're doing, editing small pictures won't make much of a difference but editing huge images or editing huge video or audio files may be a lot faster.

You see, it depends on what you want to do with your PowerMac.

[Panzer]

Another thing to keep in mind is that the 133mhz systems has some different features too. They went from 2x to 4x AGP, and added an additional PCI slot for a total of 4. They also dropped a ram slot if I recall correctly, going from 4 to 3.
So those changes may actually be more important to you than the 33mhz bus difference. But like someone else said, it depends on what you will be doing with it.
Good luck.

[DrBoar]

There really is no performance gain going from a 450 to a 466. The thing that my be important is that no G350/400/450/500 had CDRW while the 466/533 had it as an option. I have used a G4/400 and G4/466 side by side and I could not tell any difference in speed what so ever.

I could tell the difference between a 7200/90 and a 8200/120 but not 8200/100 so I can percive a 33% gain but not a 11% gain.

[snerdini]

This is one area where Apple appears to be way behind their PC counterparts. You can buy motherboards with 533 or even 800mhz FSB's for less than $200. I haven't actually used one that fast, but why can't Apple at least come close to that? I would imagine their media-based products could benefit from a faster FSB - is it the G4 that's holding this up?

[schalliol]

Probably more of a benefit if you are planning on upgrading the CPU. Also the Digital Audio units have 4x AGP slots and one more PCI card slot if I recall correctly (one less RAM slot though).

[horrorbiz]

Thanks alot for all the feedback. I am a design student in college. I do alot of 2d work in photoshop, illustrator, indesign, quark. I also use iphoto (which is unbearably slow on my g3) itunes and internet apps. I am running OSx 10.2.6 as well.
It seems like there are mixed reviews of the digital audio speed increase.. and they are pretty hard to come by. I have found tons of sawtooth g4's. So I guess I will continue looking> digital audio or sawtooth or core crib...

[schalliol]

It all comes down to cost. The QuickSilver machines are nearly the same as the digital audio if for some reason they're less. You'll need to check the stats, I believe that some models came with less cache than the digital audio counterpart and would be slower at the same MHz.