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By Bryan William Jones Review date: 9/21/99 |
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| The Final Word | |
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The final question is, do I want to get a 466 Mhz G3 or do I want to wait for the G4 upgrades that all the CPU upgrade manufacturers have recently announced? Well, my answer is always, look at the cost benefit analysis. This is where CPU upgrades can make sense for a large number of people. If you have got a machine that you have already invested significant amounts of money in, CPU upgrades can often get you the best bang for the buck. The preliminary results that I have seen indicate that the G4 CPU's are not that much faster than the G3 CPU with applications that do not take advantage of the AltiVec instruction set. [This can be seen in my XLR8 G4/400MHz tests vs a G3/400MHz-Mike] There are a significant number of software developers that have announced support for AltiVec acceleration, including Adobe's Photoshop, and IDL from RSI. However, if you factor in the cost of new software, and the CPU upgrade itself, (Prices have not yet been announced by any of the manufacturers but you can bet that there will be a significant premium for the G4) the cost may actually be prohibitive. My advice is to get the hardware that you need to do your job now if it will make your work (or play) more productive, and don't always try to keep up with technology unless your work demands it. The G4 chips will not be for everybody. My guess is that the transition from G3 to G4s will take just a little while. When Apple transitioned from the 68040 chips to the PowerPC chips the performance benefit was not immediately realized for many people. Initially chip speeds of the PowerPC chip (in terms of Mhz) were slower than the 68040 chips and much of the software was not yet optimized for the PowerPC chip. Right now the G3@466 gives a fantastic boost to performance for significantly less money than the G4 will run you. In fact with the current pricing, the 466 cards cost a lot less than the 400 Mhz cards of just a couple of months ago. |
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Availability/Pricing: The G3's at 466Mhz are available now for typically $940 at the date of this review.
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| If you have any further questions about
this review, please don't hesitate to contact me at: bryan.jones@m.cc.utah.edu
For reviews of other CPU cards at this site, see the CPU Cards page. The home page (www.xlr8yourmac.com) has links to reviews of Systems, SCSI controllers, Video cards (incl. 3Dfx), Game related articles and some of the most useful daily news on the net (updated 7 days a week). Thanks for stopping by! |
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Intro | Benchmarks | Appl. Tests | Software/Controls | Documentation | Specifications | Summary - or -
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