Noah John wrote:
the ibook is definatly a good purchase. from what i gather, some sound still doesn't work. However, what i really meant to say was:G3 500 MHz vs. i386. is about an 800-933 MHz P3 is about a 733 MHz Athlon or P4 is about a GHz celeron (celeron has no b-side cache).
You certainly have benchmarks to prove that ?The G3 in the iBook has only 128k of L2 cache, and it is slower than my iMac G3 400 (which has 512k of this same cache).
If you want a powerhorse of a laptop, get a TiBook, or an x86 laptop. The x86 will give you a crappy architecture, and not much battery life.
In the end the iBook's performances are more than enough for playing mp3s, playing quake3 in macos, do hacking, and a bit of GIMPing. DVD playback should be possible if we get a version of libmpeg2 that's a tad bit faster.
*however* it must be realised that it is immpossible and even foolish to compare MHz values between these architectures, since ppc is a RISC (reduced instruction set computing) as opposed to CISC (complex instruction set computing) i386s.
Cheers -- /Bastien Nocera http://hadess.net