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stwain2003 · Feb 29, 2004, 03:24 PM

I have a great offer on a dual g4 450, and my dad's got me scared its gonna be 2 slow. Specs:

dual 450 G4
512ram
30gig ata/66

Is this gonna be too slow fo garageband? i will be using that very often.

Luca Rescigno · Feb 29, 2004, 03:59 PM

For GarageBand? I don't know. But I have a dual 450 myself, and I have to say it's nice and zippy in almost anything I do with it. Unless you NEED GarageBand for something, it should be fine. Hopefully it's dual-optimized, but from what I've heard, it sounds like it's slow on any machine. Maybe it'll get a performance update sometime.

juanvaldes · Mar 1, 2004, 02:48 AM

What else are you going to do with it? How much will it (I assume) cost ya? I had one but really, in a few months it will be four years old which is DAMN old in computer years.

Captain Obvious · Mar 1, 2004, 05:42 AM

Take it, if you find it to be too slow then you can resell it. If it is really a good deal you can make our money back and maybe a couple bucks on top of that.

Luca Rescigno · Mar 1, 2004, 04:23 PM

Originally posted by juanvaldes:
What else are you going to do with it? How much will it (I assume) cost ya? I had one but really, in a few months it will be four years old which is DAMN old in computer years.

Still, it's useful. Think of the PowerMac 9500, released in 1995. Four years after it was a brand new machine would have been 1999 - that's when OS 9 came out. A 9500 will run OS 9 really, really well. In fact, until OS X's release in 2001, a PowerMac 9500 would have been sufficient for basically anything in OS 9. That's a seven-year useful life span. After that, you could still upgrade the video card, processor, hard drive, and RAM to give it more life. By now they're a bit too old to be very useful in OS X, even with upgrades, but they are going on ten years.

I don't doubt that my dual 450 will still be useful three or four years from now.

juanvaldes · Mar 1, 2004, 08:04 PM

I don't doubt that it is still useful, the question is will it be "fast enough" and useful to the person in question. Thus why I ask what other kinds of software will be run. I loved my 450dp tons and it's a real work horse but since getting my dual 1gig I have grown into pushing it harder then the 450 could handle (games & DVD/Video encoding).

Then the all important question of "how much". I saw dual 450's going for 550-650 on eBay just the other week. So if it's enough below that I'm with Captin' Obv in the "buy it and sell it if it's too slow" line of thought.

Detrius · Mar 1, 2004, 08:54 PM

What video card does it come with? The video card can make a huge difference in how fast a machine feels, due to Quartz Extreme.

juanvaldes · Mar 2, 2004, 12:08 AM

Originally posted by Detrius:
What video card does it come with? The video card can make a huge difference in how fast a machine feels, due to Quartz Extreme.

This is the run where ATI ****ed up, Jobs got pissed and we ended up with Rage 128 Pro's. So unless it's been upgraded probably that.