Subject:
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Re: Titanium PowerBook
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Fri, 23 Feb 2001 06:55:59 GMT
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Viewed:
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707 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Todd Lehman writes:
> I heard somewhere (I think it was a discussion group on a Mac fansite) that
> the 400 MHz units didn't play DVD's as smoothly as the 500 MHz units. I
> can't remember if that was on battery power or plugged in.
I guess I won't be able to test this from my position.
> My Vaio C1VN (powered by a 600 MHz Transmeta Crusoe) plays DVD's with an
> external drive, but the jerkiness gets a little annoying. Sometimes it's
> super-smooth and other times it's just not.
The other cool machine on sale!
> Something to keep a look out for, if you're into that sort of thing. But
> maybe the price difference between the 500 Mhz and 400 MHz PowerBooks would
> buy a whole separate DVD player? :)
Yup. It's $900 difference, for a faster CPU, +128mb SO-DIMM (not sure if
separate chip), and +10gb disk. The last two items are about $100 each if
you don't mind installing them yourself. From go2mac.net it appears not too
hard. (Easier than my 2400, and not much different from the other PowerBooks
I've owned.) Being generous, that cpu speed bump costs $650.
I spoke to another dealer (Dave Manning of upgradestuff.com) about 500mhz
G4 ZIF upgrades. He says they're available from Sonnet, but concedes they've
been in *short supply* because those puppies are going into other, hotter
products right now.
Now that I've got one G4, I lust after upgrading all my G3s...
The G4's only advantage over the G3 right now is the vector unit. So, what
is that good for?
Making MP3s. Actually this might not be CPU bound but I/O bound. The
Titanium makes MP3s at over 6x speed, chiefly attributable to the DVD-ROM,
I've heard. It's cool because iTunes starts ripping the MP3 immediately, and
the playback you hear is from RAM, while the other tracks are being read.
Generally, the whole CD is ripped by the time you have listened to one or
two tracks. My previous experience was about a 1:1 conversion time (bleah)
but that was in the early days with freeware rippers.
Compressing video. The G4 rocks when compressing Sorensen Video. I was able
to compress the 170mb movie of "2001: A Lego Odyssey" down to 40mb in just a
few minutes. I'm going to time it better. 10mb of that is audio, by the way,
so 160 goes down to 30mb when you use Sorensen. No loss of quality.
Crunching RC5. Yup, the best way to break in a new machine. The 500mhz
Titanium gets 4.4 mkeys/s. My G3s get 0.675 (Supermac/Sonnet 266) and 0.600
(Apple 233).
Rendering Lego bricks! Yes! Yes! Yes! My rendering performance is 5-10 times
faster. This is probably from faster memory, and twice the cpu speed.
Probably would be the same on a new 500mhz Imac.
Today I hooked up a second monitor to get a combined desktop of 2304x768 at
32 bits deep. Puts the spread back in spreadsheet! The chip goes up much
higher but my monitor won't.
Oh yeah, Virtual PC is supposed to work better on G4. I need a benchmark.
MLCAD is working acceptably.
So, G4 is better than G3 if you want to get far in RC5. Or compress video.
I'm looking for other uses. Meanwhile, Motorola better get its butt in gear
and go faster than 600 mhz.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Titanium PowerBook
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| Oops. I looked closely at my experiment with Marc Atkin's movie, "2001: A Lego Odyssey". It's not so easy to compress. The Sorenson 2 video codec does ruin the quality. Maybe it would improve with the professional package -- the basic codec suffers (...) (23 years ago, 23-Feb-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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