I've seen some good discussion about the G3 vs. G4 on this thread, but you all are neglecting the rest of the system when comparing the TiBook vs. iBook2. TiBook as 100MHz bus vs. 66MHz in iBook2. This is a *big* deal. Also, the TiBook has large 1MB cache running at 200MHz vs. iBook2's 256KB cache running at full clock (500MHz). So, depending on your app and how it uses the cache, you could see some major performance differences here. The iBook2 will win if the cache requirements are small (disregard AltiVec for now) and TiBook will kill the iBook2 as soon as the cache requirements go up. For me, I was hesitant about investing in old processor technology. I wanted the fast system bus, more RAM expansion, and a big cache since I think that will be more useful. I'm also interested in MacOS and I think that Aqua (or whatever it's called) must be tappinginto the AltiVec ... yikes! The DVD stuff is nice, but not a deciding factor since I already have another standalone player.
The key is overall system balance and a little planning for how you want to use the laptop in the future. It's a tough choice, but once you get things configured the price difference is about $500. -- Blake Michel Dänzer wrote:
On Tue, 2001-10-16 at 11:53, Rogério Brito wrote:My most advanced projects as a user are watching DivX movies, encoding MP3s with lame and playing files with xmms. I'd like to take the lowest (i.e., cheapest) processor that could make me watch the DivX movies without skipping.The G3 is basically enough for that, it works fairly well even on my 400 MHz Pismo. Yesterday I had a conversation with someone on IRC who suggested there might currently be problems with the dmasound drivers on iBook2s which prevent smooth playback though. The G4 can be several times as fast if Altivec is used, it's about the same speed otherwise.And what is the status of playing DVDs with an iBook2 or a TiBook?The TiBook is apparently fine now that vlc supports Altivec, the iBook2 is probably on the edge. I think it will be very hard to achieve perfect playback on a G3 without hardware iDCT and/or motion compensation.What about the region thing (i.e., the drives are unfortunately RPC2, right)?The free players don't care about that. :)