[Thade]

Hy all. I'm a long time PC user & I'm seriously considering a new Powermac. Not because I have a beef with PC's or Windows. XP is actually a pretty sweet OS . Anyhoo, I've dabbled in Linux, Unix, BeOS & I bought an iMac DV about 2 years ago to tinker wth mac OS. I bought the OS X beta & OSX but sadly the ethernet port on my mac fried. So 100% of all the macs I bought suffered a hardware failure. I recently bought an airport card/Linksys WAP & revived the iMac. I can do pretty much everything I can do on a pc but it's just so much more visual & fun on the mac... magnification on the dock ownz! So of course I started fixating on a mac as my next big purchase but I may need a little push. I don't think I can fully "experience" OS X on a G3 400

What do ya think about the dual 867 vs. dual 1Gig IF I have no use for a "superdrive"? If I understand the specs, the remaining differences are: cpu speed, memory, radeon and 20 gigs HD. I'd probably add a radeon to the 867. Will the CPU & mem show THAT much of a difference? Should I go for the dual 1 GIG?

Howz a mac for gaming, particularly Quake 3? Right now I can run q3 @ 1280x1024x32 at 145 FPS on an Athlon 2000XP, Radeon 8500. I was going to buy a Radeon 9700 for the PC but now I may hold out & put the $ into the mac & a mac 9700 down the road.

Also, is Apple pretty much the only way to go for a flat panel? I kinda like the Samsung 170MP with built in TV tuner.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thade

[cdrgonzo20]

In terms of gaming with the money you save over the dual 1ghz by buying the 867, you could easily afford to buy a killer graphics card. I have a 733 with 512mb and a GeForce Ti. Game performance is excellent, with the exception of MoH, which seems bogged down by my processor (they should do something to patch this, there's really no cause for it, RTCW is VERY quick with a ton of enemies). In general, I believe games in the future are going to use less and less processor power, and MoH will remain the exception. Max Payne plays very well at 1024 with everything full quality, as does virtually every other game. These are all moot points if you intend on using your machine entirely for gaming. There is no comparison, the PC is just a much better choice for pure gaming. The mac is a much better all around machine, especially if you intend to play around with Unix and all its variants. In my opinion OS X.2 is reason enough to spring for the mac, it really is an enjoyable experience. Just the other day I was running a photoshop script on 1000 photos, compressing a movie in quicktime, listening to itunes, and toying around in final cut pro, without causing the slightest bump. This, of course, is not even mentioning the graphical goodies in OS X. So Gaming only, go for the PC. For Gaming and computing in general, go for an 867 and pop in the 9700 when it comes out.

[Superchicken]

Dual 867 over a 400 G3?
I'd say your looking at at LEAST a 4X speed improvement from what I understand.

The Dual 867 seems to be an incredibly good machine as far as bang for your buck goes. If I had the cash now I'd probably buy it. The one thing other than proccessor speed the Dual Ghz has over the 867 is the system bus speed the difference is 133 to 166.
Unless I read wrong a while ago... Although from what I hear the speed benifts of what wouldn't be remarkable.
these look like very nice machines, and are VERY upgradable. Since you've had hard ware trouble you know having a good warrenty is good, make sure to purchase apple care when you buy

[CatOne]

Originally posted by Thade:


...

Howz a mac for gaming, particularly Quake 3? Right now I can run q3 @ 1280x1024x32 at 145 FPS on an Athlon 2000XP, Radeon 8500. I was going to buy a Radeon 9700 for the PC but now I may hold out & put the $ into the mac & a mac 9700 down the road.

Also, is Apple pretty much the only way to go for a flat panel? I kinda like the Samsung 170MP with built in TV tuner.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thade

The Mac isn't going to be as good at gaming as that machine you're talkin' 'bout :-)

It's not bad, but it's not a fire breather like you're talking about. If you want the BEST 3D FPS gaming machine, it's still a PC. Faster frame rates, and lots more games, sooner. But it's not a half bad Q3A machine -- the ones you're talking about.

The Mac is a LOT better at everything else though!

[Mac Zealot]

Don't worry about gaming.

I have a dual 800 with a geforce 4 mx (service center replaced the original twinview because it had problems)

at 1600x1024 I get 100fps solid (32 bit color!) or so when playing rtcw, with enemies, sometimes it gets around 80, but no lag

as far as quake 3 is concerned and such, ditto, quake 3 is relatively fast on a mac, what can I say

I see 1280x1024, in q3, you will probably get the same rates with even a geforce 4mx as what your PC is getting, as ironic as this may seem.

i don't know what's the big deal about mac gaming, I find it relatively pleasant, even if macs are 'clearly not gaming machines' lol.

you'll love the dual 867, running 10.2 on my dual 800 and the machine boots up into the dock (and internet automatically on pppoe and such) in about 10-15 seconds tops, was definately impressed with the speed.

here's one more for ya, when you get your computer you might want to try desktop effects, it basically runs the screensaver as your background in OS X, with a little cost to the minimize effects tho. It's not horrible when you're just chatting and using AIM and such

Have fun, and good luck with your new powermac.

[CIA]

I'm a die hard Mac guy, but that being said, I admit the PC dominance when it comes to games. Unfortunatly, regardless of specs and speeds, if you want the latest and greatest games you need a PC. I agree with the above poster though, if you want a great all around performing machine that will run all sorts of apps, Macs are the way. If you want to play Never Winter Nights and other PC only games (for the forseeable future at least). Go with a PC.
It's a bummer to type this, but it's true.

[rhogue islander]

How about a leftover DP1000 SDR or one that's been refurbed? These can be had for $2200 of you look around. www.smalldog.com is a great Apple reseller...

My Dual One Gigger with a Geforce3 gets 150fps in Q3 @ 1024x768 high quality. My Athlon rig with Geforce4 ti4600 does do better but not by much. Unless you're a diehard Q3 tourney player you should be happy.

They are both connected by a Bekin 2 port kvm to a single monitor, keyboard and speaker pair.

It's true that more games are released for the PC but you're probably already aware of that.

I am very interested in obtaining a Radeon 9700 for the mac when they become available.

[godzappa]

I'm not sure what kind of machine you have (the Athalon) but the DP 867 w/ either the Radeon 9000 or Ti and 512MB+ of memory would give you a MAJOR speed increase over the old iMac. Moving from a G3 processor to a G4 is usually very noticable, especially in Altivec aps.

So if your Athalon is good enough to play the latest games, buy the 867, and you'll see that it can hold its own no problem, but when you need to have the latest game right away you can just switch on the Athalon.

For all the other times your using a computer though, I think you'd find yourself on the Mac.

[cutterjohn]

Q3 frame rate: personally I don't really care as ~30fps is enough for smooth motion to the eye, and anything over 60fps is a waste as I believe most people's eyes max out at around ~58fps.

Now the difference with high framerates is that you are more likely to stay at >30fps if you can achieve a max framerate of 145fps, but I still think that is overkill.

In any event go look at bare feats:
www.barefeats.com
for benchmarks. In any event I think that you should be able to overkill like you want with any recent PM/vid card. me Im happy with a G4/500, ATI 128RagePro & Q3A. I never bothered to check framerates as I get smooth motion except on crap connections/servers. (A better vid card would be nice for better image quality though...)

Personally I keep around a 1GHz Athlon T-Bird/Win2kSp2/GeForce 2MX 32M for gaming(Halflife TFC/Day of Defeat) and a couple of other games that are PC only, e.g. Wizardry 8. Other than those few games, I prefer to use the mac over the PC. Also the windows flakiness gets annoying to me after about half an hour of trying to surf, read news, etc. And I just love the random & repeatable crashes(BSOD.) (I've had exactly one kernel panic with OSX and that was with 10.0, I had none in the public beta, Dev Preview 3 or 4, or 10.1.x)

Last note: personally I find notebooks to be so MUCH more useful than desktops any more. I've got the G4/500 desktop but its ended up being a glorified file/print server as I generally use the Powerbook or iBook for everything else. So you might want to think about one of the G4 powerbooks while you're at barefeats look at the game benches, and you CAN hook it up to an external monitor if LCDs for FPS games bug you the way they do me(sure love the LCD shadowing...) Apple notebook prices are actually the most comparable to the x86 world as well, esp the iBook, but you don't want that for gaming...

[Fallout]

Macs are better for everything except games. Games take forever to come out for Macs, if they even are ported at all. It sucks having to wait for The best games like GTA 3.

[dobby]

The problem is not that the mac is a bad game machine its jsut the selection of software. A mac doesn't need to be a +GHz machine to have good game performance and graphics. A single 733+ with a 32mb+ grahpics card will perform well along side a high spec PC as the mac handles the grahics better.

Dobby.

[PeteWK]

Originally posted by cdrgonzo20:
In terms of gaming with the money you save over the dual 1ghz by buying the 867, you could easily afford to buy a killer graphics card. I have a 733 with 512mb and a GeForce Ti. Game performance is excellent, with the exception of MoH, which seems bogged down by my processor (they should do something to patch this, there's really no cause for it, RTCW is VERY quick with a ton of enemies). . .

Wow, I can't follow you there at all. I have a Powerbook 667 DVI and My performance is excellent with MoH (Medal of Honor for newbies). I'm thinking your video card or memory is the slowdown here.

I have the 32 mb Radeon 7500 with 1 gig of ram. The laptop does get a tad hot but it doesn't miss a beat. Your PowerMac should be running ahead of mine any day. I would look into investing in some upgrades if you want to run games.

PeteWK