Is it really necessary to get a powerbook if i'm going to be using pro
tools le? I have a friend now who uses pro tools on an ibook g3
800mhz, don't know the ram. It "works", but can be tempermental.

I'm thinking that an ibook 1.2ghz with the max ram will do the trick,
but I just want to see what other people think.

Thanks for the help.

In article ,
(EOTHDL) wrote:

Is it really necessary to get a powerbook if i'm going to be using pro
tools le? I have a friend now who uses pro tools on an ibook g3
800mhz, don't know the ram. It "works", but can be tempermental.

I'm thinking that an ibook 1.2ghz with the max ram will do the trick,
but I just want to see what other people think.

Thanks for the help.

Ethol, I use a G4 iBook, 933MHz, 640Mb ram, 40Gb system drive and a 40Gb
external firewire drive with a Digi002. Works well for me with ProTools LE
6.3.4, OS10.3.4.

Mind you I don't use high track numbers, but the 16 track demo tha Digi
supply as a demo ran fine.

--
Mike Clayton

Sugarite schrieb:
Is it really necessary to get a powerbook if i'm going to be using pro
tools le? I have a friend now who uses pro tools on an ibook g3
800mhz, don't know the ram. It "works", but can be tempermental.

I'm thinking that an ibook 1.2ghz with the max ram will do the trick,
but I just want to see what other people think.


Beware the Altivec tax. Virtually no audio plug-ins enable Altivec, which
is responsible for 60% of the performance of a G4 or G5. The 800MHz G3 does
well because it is the fastest non-altivec processor Apple has ever put out.
A 1.2GHz G4 will not perform nearly as well.

No. This is no longer true. Please don't spread misinformation!

The G4 CPUs which are now built into the iBooks and Powerbook G4s all
have the same amount or more of on-die L2 cache as the earlier G3 CPUs
had. Therefore, any recent G4 CPU will perform equally well or better
than a G3 using the same clock even if the software does not employ any
Altivec functions.

The idea that a G4 is slower than a G3 at the same clock speed probably
stems from the fact that the earliest Powerbook G4 model came without
any L2 cache. That one indeed was computationally slower than the iBook
G3 which had an on-die L2 cache. This must have led to the idea that in
certain areas a G3 was "faster" than a G4. This was never actually
right. It was simply the absence of the L2 cache which made the G4
_system_ slower.

However, this issue has been resolved: all G4 CPUs now have L2 cache.
Any new G4 equipped Apple model now performs better compared to any
older G3.

Peter