[light in the attic]

I was thinking of getting a new 20" imac and I wanted to get some opinions. I currently have a single processor g4 1.25mhz tower with 1.25gb of ram. I pretty much max my system out with pro tools le and I do super intensive graphic work with CS@. I was thinking of selling my system and getting a new 20" imac with the BTO graphics card with 256mb and 2gb of ram. I was wondering if I will see much improvement with CS2 and Pro Tools. I'm sorry if this topic has been covered before. Any opinions and buying tips are appreciated.

[brokenjago]

wow... 1.25 mhz? That's really slow!!

I imagine you'll see improvement with Pro Tools (I believe it's universal now,) but I don't know what CS@ is .

CS2, however, you won't see much improvement because it's not univesal yet. When it is, You'll see tons.

[jamil5454]

The new iMacs are noticeably faster in PowerPC apps than the rev. A intel iMacs due largely to the doubled L2 cache. I can attest to this as I've had both. PowerPC apps like Microsoft Office and Photoshop CS2 run as fast or somewhat faster on my 20" Intel iMac than my 1.2 G4 iBook. Both systems are maxed with RAM.

Actually, going further, the iBook has a steady performance level when using PowerPC apps, while the iMac is a little slow the first time you perform an operation, but after that it's pretty quick. For example, opening up a Powerpoint presentation for the first time on my iMac takes a tad bit longer than my iBook, but once all the pages are loaded and cached, it's pretty fast. That type of stuff.

[brokenjago]

Rosetta caches frequently used code in RAM, so the more you perform an operation the faster it gets.

[light in the attic]

I appreciate the comments. It looks like the 20" imac will be a major improvement over my g4 tower. Does anyone see any major advantage to upgrading the video card? 128mb of vram seems like a lot but 256 seems even better and the cost of upgrading isn't that high. Is there a major difference between the 2 cards? I do like Halo quite a bit though i wouldn't really say that I'm a gamer.

[jamil5454]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

Rosetta caches frequently used code in RAM, so the more you perform an operation the faster it gets.

True, but it first caches it in the L2 cache, which is on the processor and is much faster than RAM access. So doubling the L2 cache improved Rosetta performance substantially.

[kamina]

The videocard should'nt make a differance in photoshop, and it certainly won't in ProTools. Photoshop will probably be a bit faster then it is on ppc, and if ProTools is a universal binary it will fly compared to the old computer (as will Photoshop CS3).