Looky what I'm buying (G4 quicksilver)
 

I'm so excited. I've been looking for a Quicksilver tower for a while now. And at $200, what a steal!! Now I can give the iMac to my sisters.

http://cleveland.craigslist.org/sys/485449028.html

Nice score. Congrats!

nice work.

I bought my 533 for $150 on craigslist, put a new harddrive in it, stuck some more ram in it, and updated the OS. Sold it for $500 cash.

I'm a total newb when it comes to Apple Computers, so forgive me for sounding naive.

Those specs, from a PC perspective, aren't all that impressive. So is it safe to assume that OS X has a much lower operating overhead than say XP Pro?

Apple processor ratings are what you would call "doubled". A 800MHz G4 will be around 1.5-1.6 GHz PC speeds. Plus, OS X runs with fewer operations, thus being a quick operating system. Believe it or not, my 600MHz G3 iMac I am on now seems WAY faster than the sister's 1.2 GHz P4 system in the living room, and theirs has 512 ram, and a 60gb HDD, while my iMac is 256ram and 40gb HDD.

Thanks for clearing that up for me. So, another question...doe apples tend to run cooler than a comparable pc?

Yay! It's officially mine! Going to pick it up Friday night, unfortunately, I won't be allowed to use it until Christmas morning, as it is a gift from my Dad to me, he just let me shop around for one, and I came across this beaut. :D

Comparing a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer - Intel/AMD) processor to a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer - Apple, IBM, Sun) processor is like comparing apples to oranges. They go about processing data in a VASTLY different way, therefore their processor clock speeds are irrelevant when comparing them.

The primary goal of CISC architecture is to complete a task in as few lines of code as possible. This is achieved by building processor hardware that is capable of understanding and executing a SERIES of operations, as opposed to RISC processors which only use simple instructions that can be executed within one clock cycle. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

Many people say that RISC is superior (it is NEWER than CISC), but in my opinion the performance should speak for itself. Apple for YEARS touted its RISC G series processors (which were developed by IBM and Motorola, and are simplified versions of IBMs POWER architecture for high end servers) as being superior to Intel/AMD CISC processors, but mysteriously switched to Intel Core CISC processors last year!!

To me this says alot. AMD processors used to outperform Intel processors in raw numerical performance terms. Fine. But when Intel rolled out the new Core architecture, it changed things in a HUGE way. AMD and Intel processors are now extremely different. Intel developed a way to make the processor perform one additional instruction per clock cycle, thereby making it do more work per cycle than AMDs setup, and it is therefore now much more superior (theres other things that went into it, but this is the primary factor).

The RISC IBM "POWER" architecture could not be scaled to compete with Intels new offerings in the PC market and therefore Apple chose it and dropped their G processors. Megahertz numbers are a HUGE factor in influencing customer purchases, and Apple couldnt sit around with its 1.5ghz G5s that sucked up huge amounts of power and were HOT AS HELL, but performed as well as a 3ghz Pentium, because they looked worse on paper to uninformed customers. Even though the 1.5ghz G5 is as good as a 3ghz Pentium 4, your average person doesn't see it that way. It was hurting sales.

So...you can't compare directly older Apples with G-series RISC processors to things like Pentium 4s. There are too many factors. But now that Apple uses your regular PC garden variety Intel processor, the differences are much less, and boil down to the software (OS) aspect of things. Of course, OS X is based on BSD Linux....sooo..thats a whole new can of worms.

UBUNTU FOREVER...and damn I'm long winded.

Well, I got it. This computer IS A MONSTER compared to the iMac. I LOVE it, and Dad let me have it now. 8) All I can say, is that everything is as smooth as silk, and turns out the video card WASN'T a 32mb, but a 64mb!!! :D

Well, I finally got some pics. My digital camera took a spill last week and died, so deal with the camera phone pics. :lol:

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