[Patsfan1978]

I was wondering about this. On paper it looks close.
I have a G4 550 PB. Is a G4 500 Powermac much faster or equal to my Powerbook? I have heard the desktops are faster than the Powerbooks.

Thanks for any info.

[Lateralus]

In my experience, a 466/450MHz G4 desktop is about as fast as a 667MHz-ish PowerBook.

[Luca Rescigno]

Yes, a G4/500 tower will be faster than a G4/550 PowerBook. However, the G4/500 tower originally shipped with a Rage 128 graphics card, which does not support Quartz Extreme. You can certainly run OS X without Quartz Extreme, but it's not a pleasant experience. The G4/550 PowerBook will be faster than the tower if the tower still has its stock graphics card, because the PowerBook came with a Radeon Mobility graphics chip that supports Quartz Extreme.

Of course, since the PowerMac is expandable, you can easily add a graphics card much more powerful than a Radeon Mobility (even the standard Radeon Mac Edition is faster, with double the VRAM), negating any advantage the PowerBook has.

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
negating

Negate - Negating:

From WordNet (r) 2.0:

negate
v 1: be in contradiction with [syn: contradict, belie]
2: deny the truth of [syn: contradict, contravene]
3: prove negative; show to be false [syn: contradict] [ant: confirm]
4: make ineffective by counterbalancing the effect of; "Her
optimism neutralizes his gloom"; "This action will negate
the effect of my efforts" [syn: neutralize, neutralise,
nullify]

[WizOSX]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan
In my experience, a 466/450MHz G4 desktop is about as fast as a 667MHz-ish PowerBook.

I think that's just about right. There are many reasons for this, e.g. faster hard drives, bandwidth, possibly greater L2 and/or L3 caches. I owned a Ti550 for about a year. A very nice machine, but really not as fast as it should have been in OsX for a G4/550. I think one of the main reasons is the video card. The Ti550 has a 16mb "card." You can put any kind of inexpensive 64mb video card in the 500mhz Tower and that difference is huge to OsX. And, of course, you can cheaply and easily add as much RAM as you want to the tower.

[Luca Rescigno]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
4: make ineffective by counterbalancing the effect of; "Her optimism neutralizes his gloom"; "This action will negate the effect of my efforts" [syn: neutralize, neutralise, nullify]

Your point being? I used it properly - the PowerBook's only advantage over the tower is that the stock graphics in the PowerBook support Quartz Extreme and they don't in the tower. Buying a better graphics card for the tower, one that supports Quartz Extreme, will negate that one advantage that the PowerBook has over the PowerMac.

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
Your point being? I used it properly.

Thats correct.

But MacNN has a strict no-college-words rule.

[WizOSX]

The Ti550 has a 256k L2 cache and the 500mhz Tower has a 1mb L2 cache. That is a major boost to performance.

[tooki]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
Thats correct.

But MacNN has a strict no-college-words rule.

But only on April Fools' Day.

tooki