Pricing-Performance need clarification

[Karl Blessing]

I am a PC User (HEY! put those rocks down :} ), But I'm flying around the web , looking at apple's site, bunch of other places that sells macs, at first I'm confused, why is a low speed (450Mhtz) and low memory (only 64Megs) being sold at 1,700$, especially when the graphic chipset is well outdata(ATI Rage128), someone mentioned it was because the Mac CPUs use a RISC artitecture, as compared to the CISC found in AMD/Intel CPU on PC market, I'm still curious as to where they benchmark this, And I would be interested in trying out one of the Macs myself, any sugesstions for a "Sort-Of" first timer (only macs I used to work with, are 2 year old PowerMacs running OS 8.1 in a School I worked as a Technician for a year and a half, and an old Quadro running OS 6.5.5)

 

[ptswolfman]

Comparing the clock speeds is like (pardon the pun) comparing Apples to Oranges. Yes the Macintosh uses a RISC based processor so it's doing multiple taskes in the same clock tick as the AMD/Intel groups. Makes it nice because a 400MHz G4 will outperform a 900MHz AMD Athlon. (And no I'm not just saying this as a Mac user...I've been a technician for eight years, starting off with Macs. Over the years I've become a realist and I now use PC's as my main workforce..don't get me wrong, I still LOVE Macintosh and will always believe that it has the better arcitecture).

Now with the DUAL 500MHz G4 Cubes (aww arn't they cute), Macintosh is taking the field by storm (again).

Yes, the ATI video cards used are a bit outdated, however, they are well matched with the rest of the computer so they work well together. As an alternative, if you chose to go with a Macintosh, check out any other PCI video card. You can usualy find the drivers on it's website and they work great in any PCI Macintosh (I've installed a Voodoo 3000 32MB recently into a G4 Tower). [sig]<a href=mailtotswolfman@home.com>ptswolfman@home.com</a><br><a href=

http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=1402203>Brainbench.com's

Online Certification Transcript</a><br>A+ Certified Technician with service certifications for Macintosh, Compaq, Toshiba, IBM, and HP[/sig]

 

[Karl Blessing]

I know about the V3 made for macs, also when saying 400 -> 900, I dont belive it's that great of a performance wise, but like you said, apples to oranges, due to the difference, the software may perform better on one than the other, also since yer a technician, you know as well as I do that a Dual 500 does not = 1GigaHertz, but remains at 500Mhtz speed, so that you can do two processes at one time, also the RISC doesnt mean a single processor can do multiple tasks at once, all CPUs, perform only one task at al time,which is where multiple processors come in, there are no independant CPU itself that can do more than a single task at a time. But thanks for your input, at the moment mac hardware is still way too expensive for the equivilant speed (not talking 400 = 400, but talking what you said, for example 800Mhtz AMD, is still cheaper than a 350Mhtz Mac) [sig]<p>Karl<br><a href=mailto:kb244@kb244.com>kb244@kb244.com</a><br><a href=

http://kb244.com>

</a><br>Experienced in : C++(both VC++ and Borland),VB1(dos) thru VB6, Delphi 3 pro, HTML, Visual InterDev 6(ASP(WebProgramming/Vbscript)<br>

http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=629151

[/sig]

 

[Lupine]

I think relevant to this conversation is the question
of OSX and parallel processing. If OSX utilizes all ethernet
chips and processors on the network as co-processors then
its... come si dice &quot;the whole new balgame&quot;

I have it from reliable source that this will be the case
but I've seen nothing official from Apple [sig]<p>Lupine<br><a href=mailto:RobertCorrina@patownsend.com>RobertCorrina@patownsend.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br> [/sig]