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booboo · Feb 18, 2003, 09:54 PM

Remember when the 733 came out, and its performance was disappointing (was it the deeper pipeline?) when compared with the 533.

It was said at the time that software would need to be optimised to take advantage of the 733 G4's new architecture.

Well was it? Is it?

How does the 733's G4 design stack up against the 533? And how does the Dual 533 stack up against the Dual 867?

I ask this from the point of view of someone who is about to buy a Dual 533 out of desperation, and who probably shouldn't have sold his 733 before Xmas....

Tmaxx · Feb 19, 2003, 03:08 PM

I use a 733 at work in 10.2.4 with no complaints. It depends on what you use your box for and what your budget is. I would buy a 733 before buying a dual 533....but then again I wouldn't even consider one of these "old" units when you can get a "new" giger for 1500.00.

Anand · Feb 19, 2003, 06:40 PM

No the problem was that the 733 did not have any backside cache. And we all know what that does to the G4. The old single processor 533 (and hell the 466) still beats a 800 iMac. No doubt about that. The G4 without a backside cache is really, really poor. Just wait until comparisons between the single processor tower and the new iMac come out. The iMac will get crushed in every benchmark. And it all comes down to that cache. The 733 sucked, the 800 sucked and the powerbooks without cache all sucked. The only things keeping the G4 (and Apple) alive are Altivec and that backside cache!

AsahiToro · Feb 19, 2003, 07:23 PM

Originally posted by Anand:
No the problem was that the 733 did not have any backside cache. And we all know what that does to the G4. The old single processor 533 (and hell the 466) still beats a 800 iMac. No doubt about that. The G4 without a backside cache is really, really poor. Just wait until comparisons between the single processor tower and the new iMac come out. The iMac will get crushed in every benchmark. And it all comes down to that cache. The 733 sucked, the 800 sucked and the powerbooks without cache all sucked. The only things keeping the G4 (and Apple) alive are Altivec and that backside cache!

My Digital Audio G4 733 has 256K of L2 cache and 1 MB of L3 cache:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...ac_g4_733.html

Mac Zealot · Feb 19, 2003, 08:06 PM

yeah but that's the graphite 733.

man I really feel bad for the people who got their $3500 machine dropped to $1699 the day after lol.

robby818 · 08:35 PM

People seem to be talking about two different 733 models. Apple sold a Quicksilver 733 last year w/o the L3 cache for around $1200 through the education store. Then I believe there was an older 733 (maybe not a quicksilver) that did have the L3 cache.

L3 cache does of course improve performance but Anand you are exaggerating it's role. It helps cut time off in certain tasks like rendering in iMovie but really it doesn't cripple a system like you implied. Also, when you compare systems like the iMac to the tower, there are a lot of other differences besides L3 cache that need to be accounted for before you reach the conclusion that it is all about the L3 cache.

Barefeats comparison-
http://www.barefeats.com/pm01.html

booboo · Feb 19, 2003, 08:31 PM

I was referring to the 733 with the backside cache - I had one - is was generally felt to perform only slightly (10% or so) better than a single 533, and this was at a time most benchmarks were done in OS 9.

The excuses given were that the 7450 revision chip, used in the 667 and 733 had deeper pipelines and would not show their advantages until software was optimised for their architecture. Mike over at XLR8YourMac had suspicions that it was the chips particular errata that were responsible for the less than expected performance...

Anand, if the single 533 still beats the 800MHz iMac, then a Dual 533 must be fairly pokey? Especially exclusively using OS X which gets fairly close to fully benefiting from a second processor?

Yes, a new 867 is an option, but frankly I couldn't live with the noise. I tried. I lasted an hour. Bye bye MDD.

Tmaxx, you say you'd rather have a 733 than a Dual 533, this desoite the fact that many benchmarks upon the 733's release - and it was the top of the range Mac then, with full backside cache - show a SINGLE 533 keeping up within a 733 for many processor intensive tasks...

I wondered if anyone had seen any current benchmarks of the Dual 533 - is it better of worse than 60% of the Dual 867, for example...

SalBaker · Feb 19, 2003, 09:03 PM

I am waiting for the 1.4ghz Macs to start shipping. I have the earliest 733mhz superdrive Mac, and I have pre-sold it for a little more than half what I paid for it. I don't think that's so bad.

You guys have to stay away from techies when you sell your Macs. Stick with designers. Most have no idea about the things your discussing. In fact, a designer at work bought a wind-tunnel Mac (at full price) and had no idea that Apple had come out with new models-and price reductions-2 weeks earlier. They also had no idea what a Macworld was.

BTW, my SP 733 has been a real work horse.

docholiday · Feb 20, 2003, 02:54 AM

I have a graphite 733 (Digital Audio/L3 Cache) and am pretty happy with it.
The IBM HDD it shipped with stopped working a few months ago so I bought a WD 80 gig SE.

I was thinking about upgrading my 512 megs of ram to 1 gig. Would I see any difference in speed? I occasionally encode movies, and multitask quite a bit too.
Is maxing out my ram worth it or should I stick to the amount I have?

I am thinking about buying a new system either late this year or beginning 2004.

DrBoar · Feb 20, 2003, 05:19 AM

There has been some tests of accalerators for the G4 with G4/800 with and without L3 (see xlr8yourmac) in real world applications the one with L3 is not quite twise the speed of a G4/400. Without the L3 the performance is about as a G4/400 to a G4/600 depending on the application.

Due to the longer pipe lines it seems the >600 MHz G4 gives about 0.8 the performance of the old G4s. So to double the performance of the 400-500 MHz G4 you need to go to 1.0-1.2 GHz.

If the original CPU is to slow something that is 30-50% faster will also be to slow. My rule of thumb is to be useful a upgrade (unless it is very cheap) should double the performance. So if you have Sp733 with L2 a upgrade has to be in the dual 1Ghz range to be truly faster ( or a 1.5 GHz SP if it was aviable).

I do not know the price difference between a dual 533 and a dual 867 but the largest differenc is not the 334 MHz between them the dual 533 did not have a CDRW a major problem and it also have the outdated ATI 128 card that is a problem if you do games.

booboo · Feb 20, 2003, 08:31 AM

Originally posted by DrBoar:

I do not know the price difference between a dual 533 and a dual 867 but the largest differenc is not the 334 MHz between them the dual 533 did not have a CDRW a major problem and it also have the outdated ATI 128 card that is a problem if you do games.

This particular G4/533 has a Radeon videocard, (plus I think the Rage 128 was a lot better than it's given credit fot)I also have the DVD-RAM from my old 733 to put in the 533.

My original question was really: has the gap between the 533 and 733 versions of the G4 widened, as it was supposed to, or does the 533 remain as close performer as it was when the 733 was released...?

You're right about upgrades, I generally only upgrade when there is a clear 2x performance increase. The exception was the 733 Digital Audio replacing a Sawtooth G4/400. This I did for the DVD writer, but also because it was cost effective (I got the 733 cheap, and a good price for the 400) but the performance boost didn't even feel like 50%

However, when I pick up this G4/533 DP later today, if I'm not blown out, at least its performance will be well over 2x what I currently have (8600/G3/400 running 10.2.4)

DrBoar · Feb 20, 2003, 10:27 AM

A 8600 with G3 sound sweet to me currently I had to dust of what was a 7200/90 but with a motherboard swap and a 604E/200 CPU turned into a 7600/200 running 8.6 I do have the option to run 10.1 in a 7500/200 but that is really slow!

The ATI 128 is a very good card, 2D is very good and games runns well up to 800x600 or so but for games a card like the Voodoo 3 2000 was way faster and my nagging about the 128 was more that Apple has keeping it for so long after much better cards were aviable. A dual 533 will probably run X very nicely and the Radeon is just icing on the cake!

Anand · Feb 20, 2003, 01:36 PM

boobo said
"I wondered if anyone had seen any current benchmarks of the Dual 533 - is it better of worse than 60% of the Dual 867, for example"

If your compare some of the benchmarks that have been down at macworld (but not head to head), no the dual 867 is no 60% better than the dual 533. It is about 20-30% better. That aint bad considering the MDD also has a lot of other benifits (it acts as a hand dryer).

AsahiToro · Feb 20, 2003, 02:44 PM

Here's a good site for comparison:
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/compareindex.xhtml

I went from a Sawtooth 450 to a DA 733 and I'm happy with the increase. The expandibilty was the main reason I wanted to go to a machine with a 133mhz bus and 4X AGP. I got a great deal on the 733 which sealed the deal.

bradexample · Feb 20, 2003, 05:51 PM

my main machine is a dual 533 which i've had almost two years. still a great machine, especially under os x. with a gforce4ti, plays most games great at higher quality settings. w00t.

sek929 · Feb 20, 2003, 10:14 PM

Although some seem to refer to the first QS 733s performance as "poor" I find nothing wrong with running 6 - 7 apps at once and 10.2.4 on mine....sure the Dual 867s I use in the lab feel a bit faster, but its not really noticable.

As Mac Zealot said, it was basically a 3 grand machine dropped to 1699, and thats why I ordered one 2 days after it was announced

Now it has a backside cache, but its a 256K on chip cache running at full proc speed, it was just missing the additional 1mb L3 running at 1/4 proc speed.