[quicksilver8907]

I am just graduating high school this year, and I am serious about pursuing a career into the entertainment industry in the post production field. I am outgrowing my pc, and need something I can edit on better. I am debating between getting a dual processor g4 1ghz or a dual processor g5. Obviously the price is quite different and thats where the problem starts. I dont want to spend 400 dollars on a g4 and not be able to use it after a year. But I also dont want to waste 1300 on a dual g5. Please help me
Thanks
Tyler

[Big Mac]

G5s are going for a lot less than that, sadly. Have you checked eBay?

[DrBoar]

A minimac will outperform any dual G4, with 2GB RAM and an extrernal FW drive it will also outrun most G5s.

So stay away from the G4s and think about either a second hand G5 or a new minimac. If you get the latter, stay away from non native applications(not Universal Binary) as Rosetta emulation soaks up both CPU power and RAM space by a factor of 2 or so.

[P]

It's Mac mini, not minimac, and while the mini is a decent performer in many things the vector performance is bad on the Core Duo (the Core 2 Duo is much better, but there are no Core 2s in the mini...yet) and the disk performance is terrible. Both of these have a significant effect on video editing. While an external HD can limit the effect of the latter, that external HD also drives the price up. The mini can still outrun G4s because of the horrible FSB on G4s, but the only G5s it can outrun are single core models when running multithreaded apps. Of course you can construct an integer benchmark where the Core Duo can win due to bigger L2 cache or lower memory latency, but not in any case that seems relevant to the editing question.

The best buy for you is probably a midrange iMac. With a real GPU to support the CPU during editing, you can have a much more powerful computer, but of course they're not cheap. You might consider a used dual G5 or a G5 iMac as a stop-gap - the last gen before the Intel switch (the iSight models) in particular - or some refurb deal.

[ninahagen]

What is your all out max budget?

[Lateralus]

Do not post the same thread twice in two days.

And the title of your previous thread was changed by another moderator because it gave no clue as to what the thread was about. And yet you created this thread with the same title...